outlines

I've never been a fan of outlines. In school, as an English major, I wrote many, many papers, and I never outlined unless it was required as part of the project. I always fancied myself sort of a stream-of-consciousness writer. That is, I would sit down and just chunk out an entire initial draft, in one sitting if possible (even for long papers). Then, over the next few days I would refine what I had written. I found it much easier to edit my papers and tweak what I needed than to outline and then write. Too many steps.

However, that process has caused me a ton of grief when applied to a project the size of a novel. There is just way too much going on to fly by the seat of my pants. For a long time when someone privy to my story would ask what's going to happen, I'd smile and tell them I'm as anxious to find out as them. But, the difficulty with that process is that with so many characters and plot lines, it becomes impossible to really tie them all together and have good interrelationships without good planning. I've hit some walls in knowing how I wanted to take my story, and I don't want to get far into it without a plan, and then find out that something just doesn't work and have to do a TON of rewriting.

So, I'm going to take a middle ground approach. I'm certainly not going to be a hardliner when it comes to outlining. But, I think it's time I figured out just what is happening with my novel. Robert Jordan always said that he knew the last scene of his Wheel of Time epic before he ever started writing. That means he was looking 12 novels ahead. I still don't know how my story is going to end, and without knowing that, its becoming increasingly hard to develop characters to that end.

So, I have finally sat down and forced myself to start outlining. It's more difficult than I thought and it throws upon my mind the enormity of the project. There is so much yet that I don't know about my own story. I need to figure it out. This is true with respect to plots, characters, etc. I'm still trying to even come up with names for items, places, etc.

The other step I took tonight was to sit down and outline out various problems that I saw with my novel. For example, the beginning scene shows the protagonist sitting in the sand outside a small village. I realized, however, that common sense would simply now allow this to be a small village. With what was happening in the scene, it just didn't make sense. So, this small village suddenly became the vast, sprawling capitol city. The sands where the character was sitting have become the rooftop of a citadel. Huge change, but it works. I'll be very happy with it once I wrap my brain around it a little more.

I think authors in general, and particularly myself, have a very hard time parting with our ideas, as though every idea we ever have should just work from the chutes. If only.