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

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

I've tried different things. Pantsing comes more naturally to me, and is more fun, so it's what I did first. I tried outlining a novel once, but it was a disaster -- so lifeless I can't even remember what happens in it. I think that's because I hadn't grokked the WHY of outlines.

But while working on the latest project, I stumbled across Blake Snyder's Save the Cat books -- which are about screenplay writing -- but I think his "beat sheet" method of building a screenplay helped me immensely to understand what an outline is FOR. I thought of it as a very mechanical thing that you do to keep a plot in order. But now I understand it as something you use to make sure that you are hitting the right emotional beats for the story you're really telling.

Mark Teppo's Hardy Boys method sounds like it does a similar thing.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

I've seen the Save the Cat books, and wondered whether they're worth reading, would be worth reading if it weren't for the fact that when one is reading one isn't writing, or not worth it at all. "Hitting the right emotional" beats sounds like a good target for an outline. Once that is done, one can just seat-of-the-pants it to fill in the things in between.