Outlines
One of the very first books on writing that I read was “How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy”…or something. To be honest, I don’t remember much of it. For some reason, however, I do remember Isaac Asimov explaining to us how he wrote a story. What he did was to start at the beginning and continue writing until the story was over. At the time, I took this as The Good Word. After all it was from The Good Doctor. How could I go wrong?
So I wrote stories that began on a whim and continued through plot turns and twists that went nowhere. Most of the endings were ambiguous. The characters had no real motivation and conflict came from an arbitrary sentence that I wrote on the spur of the moment. Even after I cut most of the chaff, I still didn’t have a plot. That is when I discovered the outline.
According to Robert McKee, the author of “Story”, the outline is the tool invented by writers centuries ago to organize the elements of a story. It is a tool that the writer must master. At first, the outline seemed to box me into a corner. It forced me to stick to the structure of the story, and that was just uncreative. Until my epiphany.
We know that a story is a plot. And a plot is a coherent structure. Of course, there’s much more to it than that, but without that framework, a writer has nothing. And that horrible outline that was boxing me in the corner was the face of Grim Reality staring me in the face and saying, “You don’t have a plot”. And creativity was still there, but it was forcing me to obey the laws of structure.
What has evolved though, is something in between. Although my friend Chris seems able to stick to one from beginning to end (sometimes), I certainly cannot. I think the best path is somewhere between a stream of consciousness free-form and adhering to an outline. When I finished the first draft to my novel, it had about 75 thousand words. That didn’t seem like a lot, but it was a fair amount to start. Much of the novel was free-form, you could say. It evolved as I wrote it. It was the only way to figure out what I was going to write about.
When I outlined what I had written, it turned out that I needed to strip 20 thousand words from the story. My short novel had become a novella. From there, I re-outlined the story using my first draft as the basis. I now have an outline that is coherent and has a good plot. But without that first draft, I never would have anything to work with.
Of course, everyone is different. But everyone needs to outline sometime in their story. But what about the Good Doctor? I don’t know. All I can say is that he probably did it in his head. What he called creativity and intuition was maybe just a logical structure forming in his unconscious. I don’t know. It’s just a guess.
