Even Discovery Writers Need A Damn Outline
That’s right, I said it. All y’all discovery writers need to sit your asses in your desk chairs and write a damn outline.
Probably the number one question new writers ask about creating a daily writing practice and penning their first manuscript — writing their first book — is whether or not to start with an outline. Most budding novelists have written before — essays in school, a diary, a Facebook message, a short story. Embarking on that first novel, writers already know whether an outline got them through writing projects or whether sticking to an outline felt like trying to get Gramma to tell you her famous recipe for chocolate chip cookies when she’s trying to remember the daring drunken escapades from her youth, and suddenly you don’t need caramelized confections, you really want to know who Hank is and whether he’s your secret biological grandfather. Your mother is nudging you to get the goods on the golden brown goodies, but you have so many other questions. An outline will inhibit those magical tangents (you think!).
The most sage advice one can give on whether to outline or not is to try both. Planners should try to write a manuscript from the seat of their pants — see what happens! And Pantsters should take a stab at writing an outline. Once. If it’s not the process for you, if it doesn’t work out, you do you.
To that I declare, hell no! Writing ain’t interpretive dance. Okay, poetry may be interpretive dance, and playwriting may occasionally be interpretive dance. Stream of consciousness is definitely interpretive dance. But storytelling — nope, sorry, storytelling is not freestyle, it has a structure. Not some of the time. Not maybe. Not occasionally. Definitely. Always.
Discovery writers live and breathe tension naturally. The thread that guides a good discovery writer through the story tends to be the sense that something’s wrong, and a practiced discovery writer can amplify tension by piling on — first a chipped nail, next a stain on a dress, finally the wedding is falling apart. Discovery writers don’t need an outline to tell that story, it just comes out, as words dance onto the page as if with their own souls.
The problem is, readers expect a work of fiction to follow the three (or four, as we’ll see) act structure. Not because they’ve studied Shakespeare or because they give a damn about literary criticism and what Aristotle and Freytag had to say on the matter, but because stories have been imprinted on every mind in Western culture for a couple thousand years. It’s why a four-year-old can tell you the end of the movie was boring, and someone completely uneducated in the craft of storytelling can tell you in exactly the right jargon that the pacing sucked (an official literary criticism term). When a story lacks a plot point, readers expect it, which isn’t a good feeling to have while reading.
Imagine you’ve been tearing through a behemoth 1000 page book, and you’re clearing the final fifty pages. Turning page after page, the sheaf of papers left in the tome starts to get thin, there isn’t much left, you know you’re coming to the end. Right where you expect to reach the top of the climb, the elevation of tone, the cumulation of action, reaction, the power struggle, the threat of death, the highest of stakes, the tying of strings together and finally the return home … something different happens. The writer introduces new characters. The characters engage in new conversations. They talk about a problem unrelated to everything that has come before. The pages disappear before your eyes and as you turn the final one, there has been no climax, no falling action, the protagonist has not confronted the antagonist to defeat or be defeated, it just ends.
That’s the most obvious example. But even if you’ve got a good complication at the beginning of the book, imagine your hero doesn’t try to resolve the problem. Hero finds a stray puppy. Instead of rescuing the puppy, Hero goes to a cafe and she chats with a barista for 20% of your manuscript. The conversation at the cafe can be riveting, the puppy can be the most adorable pound hound words can capture, but we’re now halfway through and Hero hasn’t done anything heroic, not even the act one melt down and failure to do anything heroic.
Heroes need to react to problems. Even if Hero reacts to problem number one, a stray shitsu on the street, by taking the adorable unlikely orphan to an adoption agency, Hero needs mo’ problems. Give us another complication, hit us, we’re ready!
Discovery writing involves numerous tangents, freewrites with no destination in mind, slugging through the mind muck to determine what on earth the plot is and what does it have to do with the riveting conversation Hero had with Barista, a hundred thousand words to discover the narrative, and when it’s discovered, it needs to adhere to an effective arc of rising action, climax, falling action; beginning, middle, end; or as I prefer these days: hook, complication, conflict, pinch point, midpoint, second pinch point, crisis, climax, denouement. Okay, it sounds complicated, but I explain the four act story structure (introduced briefly below) here.
There are a lot of important components to a story arc. It takes a lot of hustle to satisfy your readers. It’s important to write an outline to make sure that all the right stuff is in all the right places.
Even discovery writers need to make sure the elements of story structure are effective. These narrative arc plot points are tools writers use to hobble together a story that accomplishes a desired effect (i.e. makes us cry, leaves us wishing it weren’t over, makes us leave five star reviews on Amazon).
Here are three more reasons why discovery writers can benefit from an outline:
1. Know where you’re going.
The story structure expected in Western culture has made a kind of psychological imprint on audiences everywhere. Just as your readers expect how long a denouement should be and no longer, and where the second pinch point should be expected without knowing that term, writers benefit from the same imprint. Draft an outline that hits the important plot points, then put it away in a desk drawer and don’t (DON’T!) look at it if you still want to discover the story.
But imprinting the state the hero needs to be in before the complication tells you how to get from point A to point B.
If he needs both of his legs to be broken to make the final battle with the antagonist more gripping, that’s your second pinch point — write it down! Then discover how the story gets to that point, were his legs broken by loan sharks or by a jealous ex-girlfriend? How does the story end? How has Hero changed?
2. An outline is a great place to keep notes on ideas (otherwise you will forget them).
I keep a drafted outline in a document on my computer. The story changes as I discover the plot. I adjust the outline, and I add ideas I have for what’s to come. It’s a great way to gather together all of the strings. Keep a basic idea of everything you want to happen in the story, in case you forget to discover one of your ideas :)
3. Never use the writer’s block excuse.
If you’ve started a daily writing practice, or set a word count goal, or a time goal, there’s nothing more demoralizing than a day with no words. That can happen easily on the day you sit down to write a new scene, but nothing comes to mind. You don’t have a plan.
When you have an outline, even if it’s tucked in a desk drawer or buried deep in an obscure file path, you can pull it out and cheat on your discovery ethic. Your outline will have incomplete scene ideas, otherwise known as prompts. Get writing, slacker!
Here are the basics of the four act structure. Not interested? Skip to the end for the debate on whether this for real applies to every book ever.
Here’s the outline of a four act structure to get you started:
Act One: Setup
Introduce your characters and their world. An inciting incident hooks us. Complication. The first plot point is a problem for the hero to react to.
Act Two: The dramatic situation has changed, and the hero needs to react.
Give the hero a little agency. The hero tries to solve the problem, but he or she doesn’t have the skills yet, so she or he fails. Or, he or she succeeds, and further problems arise. At the first pinch point, something happens to remind the hero of the stakes.
Midpoint: Context shifting point.
Something important happens from which there is no going back; the story has forever changed, and the hero is forever changed from who they were at the beginning. A revelation, a death, an event from which recovery or return is impossible.
Act Three: After the context shifting midpoint, the hero no longer reacts, but acts.
Heroes go on the attack. Again, heroes usually fail at this point, because they have not acquired all of the skills, knowledge and allies they may need to succeed. A second pinch point reminds the hero again why all of this matters. The action rises up to the second plot point, which is the moment of greatest darkness, perhaps because the hero has failed, and got hurt doing so. They may lose whatever they love most.
Act Four: Climax.
The hero confronts the villain. Whether or not the hero wins is still in the air. Perhaps the story is a tragedy where the hero never comes out on top. Perhaps the hero wins the boss battle.
Denouement: From the French dénouer, ‘to unknot,’ which I learned from Lemony Snicket.
After the knots are unknotted, the world is different; what has changed between the beginning and the end, and what world is the hero left to live in?
After the first introduction to a story arc comes the moment of greatest skepticism. The story vaguely described above seems to be not one size fits all, but specific to one genre and not all. It sounds like an action adventure of some kind, Luke Skywalker versus Sauron. However, to some degree, the story arc described above appears in every story, from A Tale of Two Cities, to The Great Gatsby, Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, On The Road, As I Lay Dying, Ulysses (to cherry pick from my own physical bookshelf), and Kafka’s The Trial (I assume, I haven’t read that one).
Think of these plot points metaphorically. The protagonist in every great work of art has tools, whether a sword, a sharp wit, knowledge or a rich dad; every work of art has an antagonist, whether it’s a city, a revolution, the protagonist himself, the protagonist’s own willpower, the Catholic church, an ad man and opera singer, or the criminal justice system.
A satisfying story always has an antagonist. It can be the setting, it can be the time period, it can be the atmosphere, or it can be Anakin Skywalker. We’re in agreement on this point by now, I assume, so the question remains whether every great story does follow the Aristotelian or Freytagian or Larry Brooks’ Story Fix Plot Arc. I will leave that question to be argued in comments!
