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

[davidlevine]

I've done it both ways. For many years I was a serious outliner and figured I would never be a pantser, but I've gotten to the point that I can pants (is that a verb?) a short story under some circumstances, and my novel work has also gotten pantsier (is that an adjective?) over the years. Whether or not I started with an outline, I will often stop at the halfway or 3/4 point and outline or re-outline the end based on what I've learned about the story to that point.

Sometimes my outlines take the form of bullet lists, other times prose paragraphs. Once, for a novel with a complicated interleaving structure, I used a spreadsheet.

One thing I have learned is that after completing a novel draft, the act of writing the synopsis shows me where the novel's structural weaknesses lie. I now try to do this as early in the process as possible.