Do you outline your short stories?

I put together a very rough plot line for most of my short stories, normally less than one handwritten notebook page...I hesitate to call it an outline, because they're mostly just notes to myself to, as MattJ mentioned, give some form to my story before I start. Otherwise, I'd just meander all over the place with no sense of where I'm going and how to get there.

To me, an outline is a map. A guide. Along the way, if I realize I don't want to be on THIS road, I can hop over onto another road, and still get to the ending I envisioned.

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This is such a good way of putting it, just thought I'd say!

I read this thread a few days ago before I finally took the plunge and joined the forum - it's really interesting to hear how all of you go about writing short stories. Generally, I have a first sentence - it'll come into my head and I'll write it down, and that's my starting point. Then I tend to start writing without an outline, but after a page or two the direction, or main point or the ending appears, and that's when I outline. So a mixture of the two, I suppose!

Stories come into my head in all sorts of ways, though a first line is a rare beginning. That being said, it just happened. I was moving lawn chairs ten minutes ago and thought: "The day got interesting when the middle aged investment banker known only as Kobi the Dog stopped barking and started talking." Still not too sure what follows that, but something's got to.

I don't outline a short story on paper, but I could summarize it to you verbally (beginning, middle, end) before I am able to start writing it. I feel that if I don't do at least this much, I am making up a story rather than telling it, and I've yet to meet anybody--good storyteller or not, good improviser or not--who can make up a story on the fly as good as they can tell one they already know. You can edit the heck out of a story you made up on the fly to make it seem like you knew it before you started writing it, but I feel that most writers would be much better off knowing it before they started writing it. What the story consists of affects how you tell it in so many important ways.

Alchemenos Prausti said:

I don't outline a short story on paper, but I could summarize it to you verbally (beginning, middle, end) before I am able to start writing it. I feel that if I don't do at least this much, I am making up a story rather than telling it, and I've yet to meet anybody--good storyteller or not, good improviser or not--who can make up a story on the fly as good as they can tell one they already know. .

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I'd say you haven't met a lot of good short story writers. Pretty much every top short story writer I've met, or read about, makes up their stories on the fly.

The test of a good story is does it sell to a good magazine, and do the readers like it. I've met darned few short story writers in my life who can consistently sell short stories when they plan, think too long about, or take too long to write, their stories.

I can give you a yard long list of top short story writers who always write on the fly, who write their stories very fast, and who consistently sell them to top magazines.

I've written stories, start to finish, from first thought to final draft and submission, in four hours that sold for a thousand dollars and more. And years later, I can't find a word I'd change in those stories.

Nor do I edit the heck out of them. Neither do most of the other top writers I've known or read about. Like Robert Heinlein, many of my first draft are the ones that sell, though I usually do a quick second draft just to clean the story up, much as Isaac Asimov did.

Such things always remind me of how William Saroyan broke into print. He did so by write a short story a day for a month. One of those stories, written in a single day, was That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, a story that's about as good and as famous and as lasting as you can find.

Nor is it only short stories that top writers write in this fashion. I can also give you a yard long list of top novel writers whop write the same way, and who do so extremely well. Some of them often write a novel, a very successful novel, in less time than it takes many to think about and write a short story.

The last thing on earth I want to know is the beginning, the middle, and the end of any story I write, from short story to novel. For me, this means a story I'm almost certainly not going to sell, so I've learned it's also one I'm not going to write.

And, as Anne McCaffrey said, "If I already know how it ends, why would I want to write it?"

To paraphrase an old cliche, the proof is always in the publishing. If whatever method you use allows you to sell your stories to top magazines, keep doing it. If your stories aren't selling to top magazines, it's time to think about a change.

James,

The inventing of new stories is a pretty modern trend. For thousands of years, formal storytelling was dominated by those able to compellingly tell stories that most listeners were already familiar with. This is true of Homer and the Greek dramatists, of the Latin poets, of Islamic Empires of the Middle Ages, of Shakespeare and his contemporaries during the Renaissance, and throughout much of the Enlightenment.

Even in terms of everyday human interaction (casual storytelling), we tell each other stories from our lives in conversation because we know how they begin and end, and we believe others will find them as interesting as we did when we experienced them. This has been the heart of storytelling since language was invented, and it has stood the test of time.

I have never met a person who will start telling a story in conversation having no idea where it is headed, yet confident it will produce a positive reaction. And don't get me wrong: I've seen many people try it (I've tried it myself). The result 99% of the time is unqualified failure.

I like to watch improv, especially those skilled at constructing long-form narratives. But even the masters of this style of improv have to confine themselves to formulas to avoid falling off the edge of a cliff. And as enjoyable as their stories may have been the first time through, they would need a great deal of cleaning up before anyone would think of staging them again. Even relatively weak scripted plays have much stronger stories than high quality improv. If improv did not have other things to offer apart from storytelling, no one would practice it. Largely for this reason, many improvisers steer clear of long-form narrative.

>as Anne McCaffrey said, "If I already know how it ends, why would I want to write it?"

The simple answer is that you believe other people will enjoy it and find some value in listening to it or reading it. That this should seem strange to you seems very strange to me, as I assumed it was the impulse motivating most writers. My question would be, "If I don't already know how it ends, how could I ever tell it properly? Why would I even bother opening my mouth? Am I just hoping to get lucky?" I have made far too many writing blunders in my life not to be able to recognize the ones other writers make. I don't believe you can judge the success of a word or a sentence or a paragraph or a scene or a chapter independent of how it serves its purpose in relation to the whole. If a writer doesn't have any idea what the whole looks like, how can he or she judge whether or not any given part is as it should be? And I do intend that as a real question, not a rhetorical one.

Perhaps I'm just poor at writing first drafts, but I have never written a first draft of anything in my life that I wasn't able to substantially improve in numerous ways through careful editing. It is possible to edit the life out of something, yes. I've fallen into that trap before and I work hard to avoid it now. But the same measuring stick applies to most of the selling stuff I read. I don't feel that what passes as expert storytelling these days is of a very high standard, and you may have exposed exactly why. It doesn't even compare to the time-tested stuff I love from writers past, most of whom labored intensively over their best work. The only writer I read and enjoy consistently who was famous for writing quickly (novels in weeks or months) is Dostoevsky. And despite his many virtues, I feel his stories are plagued with the inefficiencies of somebody figuring out too much as he went along and spending too little time going back to tighten up. But he wrote that way because he was a degenerate gambler and had debts to pay. I can only imagine how good his stuff would have been if he had written it with the luxury of being able to take his time.

A lot of my position on this comes from acting. To perform a role well, an actor has to place far greater scrutiny on the text than someone reading it on the page or watching it from the audience. Of course you don't have to be an actor studying a play to undergo this process with a story, but it's the most common reason for doing so. And it is often only through this process that you can clearly differentiate a mediocre playwright from a master. A work may seem to hold together just fine after one or two reads, but crumble to pieces under a microscope. This holds true even among the winners of the Pulitzer, which is supposed to be one of the highest honors a play can receive. "Long Day's Journey Into Night" won it, and it is likely to be the gold standard of American drama for decades or perhaps even centuries to come, and with good reason. On the other hand, trained actors often laugh out loud when confronted with the task of bringing "The Young Man from Atlanta" to life. "Our Town," too, is a piece of junk, but one that has stood the test of time. Why? Because Sunday afternoon playgoing audiences will pay to see it; it reliably gives them the warm fuzzies. "Long Day's Journey" is now rarely staged because it's too long and bleak for modern audiences to tolerate.

Simply put, the average person doesn't subject the stories they enjoy to a microscope. This is the readership modern editors (and Broadway and Hollywood producers) are catering to, and it affects their standards. I believe that any story of 1000+ words finished in a matter of a couple/few hours can be drastically improved, even if it is worth reading in its present state. If publishers want to print it because they think it will sell, well, fine. They have businesses to run and I don't.

But if you want to talk quotes, Hemingway said "The first draft of anything is s***." Nabokov said "Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one's sputum." It is probably no coincidence that I think much more of their work than I think of Heinlein's and Asimov's.

I don't feel like outlining is really necessary for a short story, but I suppose that depends on your definition of "short". Anything below 15 pages, I would say, doesn't really strictly need to be outlined (although it can help), but in my view you really need to start some outlining toward the upper end of that scale. Anything above that almost definitely has to have some outlining.

Can we keep absolutes to a minimum in this thread, please? Some people are outliners. It's the method that works best for them. Others are pansters. That's the method that works best for them.

Some people are a mixture of the two. Some people outline some stories, but don't outline others.

There is NO RIGHT WAY TO WRITE. And your way (regardless of whether you're an outliner or a panster) is not the ONLY way, nor is it necessarily the best way - even if it's the best way for YOU. Everybody got that?

Discussion is fine - and encouraged! Feel free to explain why one method works better for you, discuss the pros and cons, etc. But lets not digress into an "I'm right, you're wrong" argument, kay?

Smish said:

But lets not digress into an "I'm right, you're wrong" argument, kay?

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But ... I am right ... and you are wrong.



Seriously, though ... I'm hard pressed to do an outline for a novel - and way too lazy to do it for a short story. Short stories are like:




Novels are a bit longer - more like "Brainstorm, loose outline, write, figure out backstory, write, brainstorm again, write, write some more, oh, screw it, I'll outline the remaining 2/3 or 3/4 of the book, write, write, write some more, and finally finish the 1st draft."

SOOooo ... I'm just hesitant to outline, period. Maybe I don't outline shorts because I finish before I reach the point of, "oh, screw it, I'll outline the remaining..."

Funny thing is, I think an outline is very helpful. I guess I just like to make things hard for myself.