The Anti Outline
Story Planning for Folks Who Hate Outlining
You might be wondering how I intend to relate to those of you who hate outlining. After all, I love outlining. It’s like my favorite thing to do. I definitely like it more than actually sitting down and writing the thing I outlined. I have written at length about outlining in prior installments of Shelf Life including Outlining Like a Boss (and Part II of same); Essay Assay Part II (outlining for essay writing); Visions and Revisions (reverse outlining); and certainly a lot of others along the way.
I like outlining because you can keep taking your outline to deeper and deeper levels of detail and specificity until you basically have the whole thing written and you just need to go through your many levels of outline and change notes into narrative.
Not every writer outlines. For some of us outlining is an undesirable writing task. I understand that, even though I don’t experience it myself. There are also those for whom outlining offers no benefit; pantsers who do not plan stories ahead as part of their method. For anyone reading who doesn’t plan and doesn’t want to, I still suggest reading on because the method I’m going to describe herein is something I find helpful for figuring out parts of a story I’m stuck on—a problem both pantsers and plotters run into from time to time.
For those who like to do story planning, or want to plan more, but dislike outlining, I think this will be super helpful. This is a great way to plan your story—however short or long, simple or complex—without resorting to an outline at all. At no point in this exercise are we going to use Roman numerals or indenting.
But first, let’s agree on how we’re going to use some terms for the remainder of this essay.
Summary—a condensed version of something longer; a brief account of the whole that includes all the main points.
Abstract—a brief summary of a longer work that gives the reader a complete picture of the larger work (all the main points included) that is created after the full work is complete. An abstract is created from the full-length work and is a specific type of summary.
Synopsis—a brief summary of a longer work that may be created before the full-length work is complete and presents a complete picture of the longer work’s points such that another party may decide to invest (any resource) in the work without having the full work to make a decision.
Key points from the above are that an abstract and a synopsis are both types of summary content. An abstract is a tool for use by the intended audience and is created after the work it abstracts. A synopsis is a tool someone may use (like an agent for a novel or a producer for a film) to decide whether to invest in the work, either before the work is created or before the investor has access to it.
If you’re a novelist, you’re probably familiar with the term synopsis used in this sense because when you pitch your novel to an agent or editor, you need to provide them with a synopsis of your manuscript. This is not like a spoiler-free teaser of what’s to come like you might see on the back cover of the book. This should be a complete overview of all your story’s main points so that the agent or editor can decide if they want to invest more time. They want to know—before they put resources like time, energy, and money into your manuscript—whether your story can work and might have commercial value as a novel.
This is one reason some writers plan their work ahead. There are lots of reasons, but one of those reasons (and, chiefly, why I do it) is because I want to know, before I invest time working on and writing the story, whether the story will work all the way to the end and whether I think it might have commercial (or other) value as a completed novel, novella, short story, or whatever.
Hence, a synopsis.
Now: Don’t go googling how long a synopsis should be. You’ll see various but specific answers like “25 to 30 pages” or “500 to 1000 words.” If you’re making a synopsis for an agent to consider your pitch, or for your thesis adviser to approve your topic, or for a marketing manager to promote your book with—then, yes, there will be some kind of specific guidance. “Include a one-page synopsis.” “Include a synopsis not longer than 300 words.” It depends on the purpose for which the synopsis will be used.
In this exercise, you are going to write a synopsis for yourself and so all the rules for synopsis-writing you may find on the internet do not apply. I will share some guidance for how I do it but, at the end of the day, the end result has to suit you and be useful for you and not for me or anybody else.
In the course of writing, publishing, and promoting a book, you probably will have to synopsize it many times to different lengths, for what it’s worth. This is just one more.
So, a synopsis.
I use this exercise sometimes before outlining and sometimes instead of outlining. Depends on the project. I find this really useful for when I have an idea of a story but I don’t have all the plot points in my mind yet. If I have all the plot points, I might start with an outline. But sometimes I am starting with a plot point or two, a couple of characters, a rough idea of the conflict they’re going to encounter, a good idea of why they make bad traveling companions, maybe an image in mind of a quirky supporting character I hope to use, and a pretty good sense of the ending.
I don’t think of this as enough to start a draft on because I don’t know yet if I can support that story with an entire plot. I want to know I have an entire plot that can support the story start to end before I start a draft. I’d rather waste some time writing a synopsis to discover the plot collapses in the third act than write 50,000 words of the first draft to discover the same thing.
To do this exercise all you need is a way to record your thoughts (keyboard and word processor, paper and pencil, voice note recorder, anything like that) and a way to annotate those thoughts as you go. If you’re working in a digital medium like Word, Evernote, Scrivener, or similar, those all have built-in features for annotating your text. When I’m writing longhand I keep some sticky notes nearby if I need to slap a note on top of something I already wrote. There’s a case to be made for leaving marginal space to add notes but I am simply never going to leave marginal space. I am always going to write on every available micrometer of paper surface because that’s just how I am.
When I have all my materials together I sit down and I tell my story. But not like I am writing a draft of the story. More like—actually exactly like—I were sitting across the table from some avid listener and explaining my plot and story to them.
This probably works well for me because explaining is like my favorite thing. I might like it more than outlining.
As I tell the story, I have only one rule and it is this: The pen (or my fingers on the keys) must keep moving. No stopping to think about what I’ll write next, no stopping to google a bit of research or ponder the perfect name for a character. The writing must keep moving. If I come to a place where I don’t know what to write next, I start writing about that. I just keep writing about how I don’t know what to do next until what to do next reveals itself. This is the magic of freewriting.
I go through the entire story as far as I know it, in “explanation mode.” Essentially, I free write about the story. It does not have to happen in an organized fashion at all. Inevitably, as I’m writing, I think of something that would have been better placed earlier in the story chronology, among the things I wrote two pages back, for example—no problem, I write that new thing I thought of on a sticky note and draw an arrow on the sticky note and then stick the note two pages back so the arrow is pointing exactly where that text is relevant.
I will also, sometimes, in the course of the freewriting exercise, write something like “actually this would be better included at X point” and then I can just draw a line around all the stuff that would have been better included earlier at “X point” and put a flag on the edge of the page that says something like, “move to X point.”
While I’m free writing, I don’t just include plot direction. I also include a lot of back story and insight into why the characters are doing what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and so on. This is stuff that wouldn’t make it onto the finished page in this form, but I’m writing a synopsis for myself and that level of detail is helpful for me when I come back to this later to use it.
During this freewriting process, I ask myself a lot of questions. Actually I ask myself a lot of one question, that question being “why.” Perhaps I have had a vision of my characters in an all-out argument in the middle of the woods at night, but I don’t know how they come to that point. I just backtrack to where I last knew they were and start asking questions from there.
Why did they go into the woods in the first place?
Why did they go together instead of separately?
Why are they still out there at night?
That’s probably enough to get to the answer of the next one, but for good measure:
What are they fighting about?
And of course, of each notation I make, I’m asking myself: “How does this move the plot forward?” That is, how do these decisions I’m making move the characters from a situation I already had in mind to another situation I already have in mind? Do the things I’m writing down serve to move the plot in the direction I need it to go in to get to the end I have already envisioned? And if not, what needs to change—the direction? Or the end?
I tell the whole story in the synopsis, from beginning to end. When I’m done—and after putting it away for a few days to get distance!—I come back and read over it to determine whether:
The plot is satisfying end to end, and there is enough action to move the story forward.
The story resolves in a satisfying way.
A dramatic question was asked and answered.
The amount of content I have will support a novel, a novella, a novelette, a short story, a flash fic, or what have you.
If the answers to 1 through 3 are all yes, and I know what kind of format I’m looking at based on volume of content, then I can begin breaking the story down into its component chapters, each with their component scenes. I can do this with sticky notes right on my longhand synopsis if I want to—sticky notes to mark the start of each chapter, for instance.
All without outing a single line.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.
Thanks, I feel like the decoupled train wreck of thought suits my writing style better than any of the disorganized ones.
Back in Freshman Writing Seminar we were discussing AI via the philosophical writings of John Searle, who described the "planner vs. pantser" thing as plans vs. situated actions. He made a nautical analogy, in that the planners were like the Western imperial navies, who, when crossing a body of water, would collect all the data about current profiles and and wind vectors and feed it into an algorithm that would output the track, rudder, and sail tack angles such that they made an efficient straight line across the channel... as long as nothing changed. Conversely the pantsers would gauge their progress across the river and continually make adjustments to their angle and thrust and still make a reasonably efficient crossing over the ebbs and flow of the current with the tides. Which was better, or harder to train? He didn't get into that, but both methods involved some level of expertise and practice.