Outlining

I don't outline.

Okay, that's not true. I do sorta kinda outline. When I'm working, I try to think at least a few chapters ahead. Beyond that, I have a target I'm aiming for. Sometimes I even go so far as to write the ending first. I think, "This is a story about...whatever." Then I start writing. Sometimes, occasionally, I actually refer to my outline, should it exist.

lost dog, for example, is a novel about a kleptomaniac who gets caught up in a game of cat-and-mouse with a killer after he finds a dead hooker in the park near his house. When I started writing lost dog, that was all I knew about it. Except I didn't know the main character, Peter, was a kleptomaniac. And I didn't know it would be a cat-and-mouse situation. And I didn't know the dead person was a hooker. But I did know the story had a guy in it. I discovered body right about the time Peter found it at the end of the first chapter.

So what the hell did I know when I started writing lost dog? Well, at the time I was taking a writing class, and I'd been assigned to write a scene with an elephant in it. The assignment formed the basis of my outline, you might say. And so, outline in hand, I wrote a scene in which a guy is wandering through the park at dawn looking for a toy his niece had lost. The toy, I figured, could be an elephant. Except he doesn't find the elephant; he finds a dead hooker. (Looking back, I have to wonder if he even tried to find the elephant.) So I failed to write a scene with an elephant in it, but I succeeded in writing a scene without an elephant in it. So much for my outline.

You may be thinking, okay, so that must be when you started outlining. You had the opening scene, you had a dead body. You were ready to work out what happens next, and where the story will take this lost elephant hunter? A good point to start outlining, right?

Right. And if by outline, you mean, "deciding that in the next scene guy will talk to the cops about finding the body," you'd be right. I did outline that. This is what my outline would have looked like, had I written it down:

Chapter Two: The guy talks to the cops about finding the body. (Also note, the guy's name is Peter, I think. Or maybe David. . . No, Peter. . . David -- figure out later.)

Unfortunately, with the next chapter, chapter three, I veered off my rigorous outlining discipline by starting the chapter before I knew what was going to be in it. At the end of the chapter, I had done some things that I thought were interesting, and so I blundered on into chapter four. My outline, still unwritten, was having a very hard time maintaining its grip on the story.

The problem with me and outlines is that if I write one out, I start disregarding it almost immediately. If, for example, I had carefully outlined those first four chapters of lost dog exactly as I ended up writing them, I wouldn't have ended up writing them that way. In that sense, I am an anti-outliner. Not that I am against outlining. Rather, whatever I write in an outline turns out to be the one thing I do not write in the actual story. I actually admire the writers who have the discipline to work out the story ahead of time and then write it as planned. But I couldn't do it that way myself.

I think that's partly because I'm less focused on plot than character. An outline, while it certainly can contain lots of character notes, seems to me to be more about working out the plot and structure of the story. On those occasions when I do outline, and then start writing, I very quickly discover plot holes that I have to fix as I go along. The process of deciding that X needs to happen is one thing, but writing about X in the context of characters transforms it into Y. As a writer, that transformation is what's actually interesting to me, and it happens whether I outline or not.

I read of a novelist whose editor requires her to produce a complete outline before writing the actual novel. That seems to not be a problem for her, but the notion sounds terrifying to me. If my own editor required that of me, I'm not sure what I'd do. Write it, probably. But I feel certain that the novel that followed would be very different.

This whole thing comes to mind because I am going away this weekend to a lovely little cabin in the woods. My good friends Ted and Melanie own it, and they are letting my wife and son and I hang out there and dabble our feet in the river as we drink beer. One of my hopes for the weekend is that I will get a solid handle on chapters thirteen and fourteen of my current work-in-progress. But if that's going to happen, I need to figure out what's gonna happen in them. I've started to think I need to do a little outlining so I'll know what not to write.