Huh. I guess I do believe in outlines after all

[commodorified]

So a shocking amount of writing advice I've encountered is about cutting the excess away, and this has rarely been my problem.

I tend to produce first drafts so condensed as to be downright gnomic, and then show them to friends who are kind enough to be informatively bewildered at me until I unpack.

Related to this, I always said I don't outline, at least outside my head. It occurs to me that my first drafts ARE outlines, really. Just, I outline in actual paragraphs.

Huh. That's an oddly useful insight.

In other news I forget where I recently saw someone comment that you can tell the difference between bad allergies and a cold because colds are PAINFUL, but that, sadly, is also very useful information right now.

Comments

[niqaeli]

When I ever get anything written anymore, it's generally from chatfic/the flailed email equivalent of chatfic -- and it's cleaned up and expanded from that into actual prose. Which is basically just a way of outlining!

I've figured out that while formal outlines don't work at all for me, for anything longer than about 2k words to have a CHANCE of getting written, I need to have a sketchy, elastic version of the whole thing written down. Or else what happens when I'm writing prose is that I stop at some point because, you know, sleep and food etc., and then I just never can pick it back up. Whereas that issue doesn't happen to me when I'm just flail-sketching out ideas, and if I have a sketch down when I start writing actual prose I find I can pick stuff back up because I'm not going AAAAHH I DON'T KNOW WHAT NEXT.

So, you know, non-traditional-outline writing club, represent!

(Honestly, it is amazing to me how much writing advice fails to acknowledge the fact that not everyone's brain functions the same way. I mean this is a general problem, but it boggles me that in a creative endeavour with so many people what ain't neurotypical that people writing advice are often terrible at recognising that their One True Way may not work for everyone.)

[commodorified]

*nod nod nod* I tend to respond to stuckness by going back and tidying what I have, which often leads to a situation where I hit the previous stopping point and just keep going.

I fail at outlining because until I try to catch *exactly* what a given character is going to say or do, I don't know what the consequences will be, or, to put it another way, I have trouble with macro-characterisation: my characterisations tend to build up act by act.

[graydon]

This -- that failure of acknowledgement -- is one of the reasons I think Pat Wrede deserves far more recognition than they've had. I may never found any of their writing advice directly[1] useful to me, but they've been absolutely relentless about quoting the last stanza of Kipling's In a Neolithic Age:

Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:—
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!"

for decades now, to the point where "nine-and-sixty ways" is, in some quarters, a useful trope name/tag phrase.

It's important.

(I write down stuff as it comes to me. It's mostly in order and some of it is stuff that has to be got to, once, memorably, nigh 200,000 words later.)

[1] thinking about why not has been plenty helpful.

[dira]

Yeah, a while back I worked out that telling the story out to someone is kind of my zero draft--I like to do it in chat so I have a transcript to refer to, because I do a lot of figuring-out that way and tend to feel out the arc of the story that way, figuring out the important bits to make it a satisfying story when it's described.

I do like to outline, though--mostly just a list of events that need to happen, which can be very vague initially and gets more concrete as I get closer, so that I'll have specific scenes worked out two or three in advance, and after that it's a series of bullet points that happen in some way and in some order yet to be determined.

[mmegaera]

I was a much better plotter when I had someone to do that with -- unfortunately, she now has Parkinsons and is no longer to help me in this respect (which is the *least* sucky thing about her having come down with Parkinsons). And I haven't been able to find anyone else to fill this role.

[dejla]

You said it!

[mmegaera]

That's how I do it, too. Writing, not colds or allergies. I hope you feel better soon.

[recessional]

Mine aren't quite so condensed and I tend to have to go in both directions, but yeah: my first drafts are outlines. I need to tell myself the whole story. And I need to tell it in a way that's still interesting to me, or else I get bored, which is what yon "normal" kinds of outlines tend to be.

The closest I get to normal ones is sometimes having in Scrivener an empty file going "so I still need that scene about the thing to go here" or "something happens between this and previous, no fucking idea what." :P

[izzy]

I've been told on more than one beta-occasion, "izzy, we don't know what's in your head. you'll need to actually write that bit down." "oh yeah. thanks." But then I've also been told that I produce "solid" first drafts, so six of one, I guess. (I don't think I've ever outlined for something fic-like. I'll fill a separate document with rambly notes, but I feel like that's a different thing?)

[stoutfellow]

In other news I forget where I recently saw someone comment that you can tell the difference between bad allergies and a cold because colds are PAINFUL, but that, sadly, is also very useful information right now.

That might have been me. You have my sympathy, from recent experience.

[dejla]

So sorry about the cold! Feel better soon! (I'm trying to send mental antibodies your way.)

I have to be careful if I put down notes or outline or whatever, because sometimes my brain decides "Well, you've written that already, so we're done with that."