Outlines: The Rails to Keep Your Plot Device Rolling Along

During the last writing guide, you interviewed your killer as part of an exercise on character development. You can use the same techniques with any character, so I hope you'll continue to interview your other characters to find out more about them, both the good guys and the bad. (And the secondary characters too, but only if you get bored.)

This week, my sixth guide in this series moves into the intermediate-level topic of plot development using an outline. Before I begin describing this exercise, I want to point out that there is no right way to make an outline, nor do you have to consider any outline as being set in stone. I'll come back to these points later, but I wanted to make this clear right away. You don't even need an outline for some stories, but during your early writing efforts, making an outline can help keep you on track if you start losing your sense of focus during the writing of the story.

The story we've been working on would seem to be a simple outline, moving from point A to point B. The killer kills someone, the cops dig up a clue, and the cop confronts the killer, leading to a fight. This sounds neat and tidy, but the scenes you've written are snapshots in a larger story, representing frames taken out of time, and out of context.

Recall that, in fact, this story started with you being the killer, and that you framed someone else. Our writing exercises haven't taken this "twist" into account at all yet. Our outlines should, because our outlines should cover all the important points of the core story before we begin writing.

Your outline points do not need to be a specific length. I've seen some people get away with one or two words to describe each point or their story, but I need a whole lot more to describe what will happen in each scene. It isn't enough to say "argument," because I'm likely to forget what the characters were supposed to be arguing over. So I spend time writing, Joe and Bill have an argument over who will leave to deliver ransom note.

Let's get back to that earlier point about this not being a road map, and I'll explain by giving a simple example. In one of my novels, I'd outlined that a victim was supposed to be murdered at a private jogging trail. However, while writing the story, I researched the city where the murder is and found that there is no jogging park in the city. Oops. The scene was changed to take place in a parking lot, and a major gaffe was avoided. (On a side note, always remember that research is vital to good writing.)

Stories can and will change to be different from the way you imagined them in the outlines. Perhaps you will develop a better understanding for a character and realize that an outlined reaction is wrong for them. Or perhaps you will find a factual error that makes sticking with the outline impractical. In any case, be prepared from the start for this, and do not set yourself up to believe in the outline as being concrete.

So, we've got our blank sheet of paper, and we ask, "where does this story begin?" If you're still following along with the exercises, then the answer is easy. You start with the first victim, the person who was killed by the "real" killer. From here, your outline should explain how the trail of evidence got shifted from the real killer to a false lead. Your cop will hunt down the false lead, and either they'll frame the wrong guy, or they will sort out that something isn't right in the case and hunt down the real killer.

Treat your outlines as sketches of the story, a loose drawing without the finer details of character or scene. The killer walks into the grocery store, fights with the sacker, and kills him. The police interview the people in line at the check out lane and run down the killer, who gives a false lead back to one of the other witnesses. The witness, a drug addict with delusions of paranoia, runs from the police, leading to a series of chases. The cop ends up getting killed during a rooftop fight, and the addict moves to Canada. He clean up his act to become a pop singer.

There. Yes, even if it is silly, that one paragraph can be an outline. Or you can go ahead and fill up a whole page. Or two. The longest outline for any of my stories was 10 pagers, but I was outlining 400 pages worth of condensed events.

My point is, you don't have a set formula, or even any idea of what a "good" finished product will look like. The point of the outline is to force your muse to plot out the story before you write the real deal. And in this way, you are organizing the events in your mind, as if they were real world appointments that you had to keep track of.

Because you do. You really do need to think like a cop, and like the killer, like a victim, and like a witness; possibly even multiple witnesses. You need to ask how these people will react to each other as the story plays out, and then, you will make a light sketch, just to see if you like the story.

When you go back to write the real story, the outline points the way in, and it shows the way out. It offers you suggestions for how to keep the story running along the plot rails, but if you have ideas along the way, don't be afraid to pull off the track to explore them. Subplots and side character developments are just as important to a story as the core story, and in almost all cases, these subplots were developed after the outlining stage.

This will be one of the harder exercise to become comfortable with, particularly because it depends so much on your personal tastes. If you can make an outline in one paragraph and feel happy with it, then this exercise could be a piece of cake. But if you're like me, you will agonize over every little detail, and getting the outline right will torture you as much as writing the full story. It does for me, which is why I now skip the outlines whenever I think I can get away with it.

The next writing guide will move back to character development to explore natural dialogue, and to explore whether it is better to reveal plot points through internalized narration or through conversational dialogue. Until then, keep working on doing character interviews and refining your sketching skills by writing up practice outlines.