Outlining before writing your fiction: good idea or bad?
The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning. —Joyce Carol Oates
When you’re writing fiction—whether a short-short, short story, novella, or novel—do you plan out your work? A little, with some notes? A lot, meticulously, with detailed outlines?
Some writers argue the act of writing is the creative engine for plot and character. Others point out that writing without a concrete (or somewhat flexible) idea of where things are headed guarantees, at best, a lot of rewriting and, at worst, a substandard product.
Lee Goldberg of A Writer’s Life draws attention to this very dilemma and comes down squarely on the side of outlining.
I am a firm believer in the importance of having an outline before you sit down to write. It doesn’t have to be detailed outline—it might only be a page or two. You just need to know where you’re going and, to some degree, how you are going to get there…or what happened to author Sandra Scoppettone could happen to you.
What happened to Scoppettone? She accidentally conflated the lives of characters, and she had to go back and rewrite large swaths of her novel. (see Sandra’s comment below for details)
I have to strongly, though obliquely, disagree with Goldberg. He, like many writers, myself included, make use of outlines as guides, or as he calls them “living outlines”. They change as discoveries are made in the writing process.
But he only acknowledges the chance of significant rewriting, whereas I would argue that major rewriting is an essential part of the writing process. As such, total rewriting should be accepted as a necessity and eventuality, and, as such, a first draft should always be written without an outline, without a net.
A first draft in my process is about generating material. You open your writing to all opportunities. And you end up writing ten disposable pages for every top-notch one. (It’s also the point that you conduct your research, if needed.) It’s only after you have all that material on the page that you create an outline, a retrospective one, that makes use of everything you’ve spit out. Then you write your second draft using that outline and the “unlimited” material.
I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few
elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive. —Susan Sontag
Of course I’ve shelved a lot of stories that way. It’s hard not to have goals to measure your writing against, and that’s a big negative in not outlining before writing a first draft … and it presupposes you have enough time to write many pages you know you’ll just throw away.
But as the truism goes: only writing is writing.
What do you guys think? What process do you find works best for you?
