Outlines

I’ve written about outlines before, but not in a while, and since then I’ve gotten better at explaining exactly what I use outlines for–and it’s quite different from how I was initially taught.

I was taught, and I think most people were taught, that outlining is a planning technique. You figure out an outline of your book or your article or whatever it is you want to write, and then you use the outline like a plan–you follow it, you do what it says.

Some people find such outlining useful. Others do not. I do not, but I outline anyway–because I outline differently.

For me, outlining is a reflective technique.

I may write an outline when I first get an idea for a book’s structure, but I almost never refer back to that outline, and if the book I write has that structure, it’s a coincidence. I just write the outline to get it out where I can look at it. No, I can’t always get a good look at the things inside my own head. Having seen it, I can get an idea of what I’m doing. If I get a new idea, I might do that instead.

I write.

I write and I write and I write. I write all sorts of STUFF, including stuff I never thought about before. A lot of it’s good stuff, but it doesn’t always belong together in a novel. So I write another outline. Or many outlines.

These outlines are basically summaries of what I’ve already written. They’re how I find out what I’ve actually written–because if I’ve got a hundred pages, I can’t really get a good view of all of it at once. So I’ve got to zoom out, to write an outline so I can see it all at once. Because once again, I can’t look at it when it’s in my head, and until I write, I don’t know what’s going to come out.

Once I write my outline, I can see what my book is about. I can see which bits need to come out, which bits need to be expanded, and which ought to be there but are missing. Then I can really get started. Then I can rewrite the book and make it actually good.

I might have to go through this process several times. The first reflective outline might come early in the first draft or might wait until the first draft is done–or until several drafts are done. I might write separate outlines for different aspects of the book. I might use multiple outline formats and multiple outlining techniques.

The point is that I don’t know what a given piece of writing is about until I’ve written it–if I decide ahead of time what it should be about, I’ll be wrong. And it is the process of writing the outline that tells me and makes further revision possible.

So, when you write, just know that’s a thing outlining can be.