Outlining

[scarlettina]

So I'm wondering how people feel about outlining. I started this book by pantsing it (in other words, writing by the seat of my pants), trying to just write it as it came, and what ensued were structural issues, idiot plotting, and uneven characterization. I'm outlining now in a very abbreviated way, a way that Mark Teppo calls the Hardy Boys method: Select a number of chapters (he recommends 26, at 3-5K or so words, a modest, achievable length, at least initially), and then to name each chapter as the chapters in a Hardy Boys book were named, following the three-act structure as you go:
Tom goes fishing with Spotty.
Tom discovers a monster in the lake.
Lake monster eats Spotty.
Tom battles the lake monster.
And so on....

There's more to the technique than that; I'm truncating it here for simplicity's sake, but you get my point. (Teppo's a smart guy; this description doesn't do the technique real justice.) I'm finding this act of simple outlining kind of fascinating because I find myself wanting to do more, add sub-bullets and more detail, but needing to stay succinct so I can see the structure as I go and stay focused on the mission immediately at hand. Structure, somehow, has become very important to me. I suspect that once I have the 30,000-foot view of the story and structure, getting into sublevels will make more sense. Some of this, I suspect, has to do with what jaylake calls span of control, how much I can keep in my head and manage at a time. I wonder if I'm overthinking it. (It wouldn't be the first time. Or maybe this is the first time I'm thinking about this particular thing in this particular way and it feels big.)

So...thoughts? Who's a pantser and why? Who's an outliner and why? Thoughts on outlining generally?

Comments

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

My current writing project (started around the time of Noir City, and put on hold as in-laws and SIFF approached) is my first attempt at outlining in decades. I find that I dislike outlining as much as I did in high school – and frequently drop into scene details when I'm supposedly writing an outline – but it looks like I am likely to get a better-structured story as a result.

Since I'm writing in formula genre (neo-noir), hitting the formula is important, so the outline makes more sense. (It would be even more true if I were writing in a more tightly-defined genre, such as romantic comedy.) The project started out with an specific plot detail puzzle: how to arrange a ransom delivery that wouldn't fail if the police simply watched the drop location until the criminals picked up the ransom. But to make that idea into a story, I need to figure out all the other details: villainous criminal characters, a sympathetic criminal character, the hostage character, and what goes wrong with the perfect criminal plot (since, in noir, something always goes wrong).

So, seat-of-the-pants is a lot easier to write, but having started writing a story with an outline, I see the benefits when a structure is imposed by the genre.

Genre formula observation:
Even if one is going to break some of the conventions of a genre, one has to start by following enough of them that it's an interesting twist when one diverges from the formula.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

That's how my projects start too: some detail that's so cool that I want to build a story around it, which may mean building a world around it. We're in good company, as that's how Narnia came about: an image of a faun carrying an umbrella -- but where and why? Like Lewis, I get several scattered cool images and need to figure out the world they're in and a plot to connect them.