Writing the Novel

Chapter 6 Outlining First, learn about outlines, by writing one of an existing book. How to write an outline of your own. How to expand it step by step into a book. Advantages of not using an outline. Avoiding outline-enslavement

An outline is a tool which a writer uses to simplify the task of writing a novel and to improve the ultimate quality of that novel by giving himself more of a grasp on its overall structure.

And that’s about as specifically as one can define an outline, beyond adding that it’s almost invariably shorter than the book will turn out to be. What length it will run, what form it will take, how detailed it will be, and what sort of novel components it will or will not include, is and ought to be a wholly individual matter. Because the outline is prepared solely for the benefit of the writer himself, it quite properly varies from one author to another and from one novel to another. Some writers never use an outline. Others would be uncomfortable writing anything more ambitious than a shopping list without outlining it first. Some outlines, deemed very useful by their authors, run a scant page. Others, considered equally indispensable by their authors, run a hundred pages or more and include a detailed description of every scene that is going to take place in every chapter of the book. Neither of these extremes, nor any of the infinite gradations between the two poles, represents the right way to prepare an outline. There is no right way to do this — or, more correctly, there is no wrong way. Whatever works best for the particular writer on the particular book is demonstrably the right way.

I’ve written quite a few novels without employing any outline whatsoever. The advantage of eschewing outlines is quite simple. With no predetermined course, the novel is free to evolve as it goes along, with the plot growing naturally out of what has been written rather than being bound artificially to the skeletal structure of an outline like a rosebush espaliered to a trellis.

The writer who does not use an outline says that to do so would gut the book of its spontaneity and would make the writing process itself a matter of filling in the blanks of a printed form. At the root of this school of thought is the argument first propounded, I believe, by science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon. If the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, he argued, the reader can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next.

There’s logic in that argument, certainly, but I’m not sure it holds up. Just because a writer worked things out as he went along is no guarantee that the book he’s produced won’t be obvious and predictable. Conversely, the use of an extremely detailed outline does not preclude the possibility that the book will read as though it had been written effortlessly and spontaneously by a wholly freewheeling author.

Some time ago I queried a hundred or so authors on their writing methods. A considerable number explained that they didn’t outline at all, or prepared minimal outlines at most. Here’s Willo Davis Roberts echoing Sturgeon’s Principle:

Tony Hillerman takes the same position, not because it’s more fun necessarily but because it’s what comes naturally for him:

In marked contrast, consider this from Richard S. Prather, author of forty suspense novels, most of them lighthearted frothy chronicles of the doings of private eye Shell Scott:

If I ever tried the method Prather describes, I’m sure what I produced would have all the freshness and appeal of week-old mashed potatoes; it would certainly not possess the sparkle of his Shell Scott books — which only serves to underscore the highly individual nature of outlines in particular and writing methods in general. If writing with an outline is for some people like filling in a printed form, writing without an outline is for others like playing tennis without a net — as Robert Frost said of free verse. In some instances, it’s even more like walking a tightrope without a net.

It’s all up to you. If you feel comfortable beginning your book without an outline — or even without all that firm an idea where it’s going — by all means go ahead. If you’ll feel more confident of your ability to finish the book with an outline in front of you, by all means construct and employ one. As you go along, you’ll learn what works best for the particular writer you turn out to be.

And that’s all that matters. No one ever bought a book because it was written with an outline, or because it wasn’t.

I want to use an outline. Now what?

The first step is to find out what an outline is. And the easiest way to do that is to write one. Not of your book but of somebody else’s.

In an earlier chapter, we discussed this method of preparing an outline of someone else’s book as a means of understanding how novels work. The process is similarly valuable as an aid to learning what an outline is.

Some years back I decided in a weak moment that I wanted to write movies. I was bright enough to recognize that film is an infinitely different medium from prose, and reasoned that I had to familiarize myself with it before I could expect to produce anything that would fly. First thing I did was start going to movies day after day.

This was fun, and it wasn’t all that bad an idea, but it didn’t teach me a hell of a lot about screenwriting. I came to realize somewhere along the way that I was taking the wrong approach. I wouldn’t be writing movies, after all. I would be writing screenplays. So, instead of studying the films themselves, I ought to be reading their scripts.

If it sounds like a small distinction, I suggest you give it some thought. What I wanted to write was a script, and in order to do that I had to learn what a script was, how it worked not on the screen but on the page. I had to be able to see a film as words on paper, not images on a screen, because I would be writing that script by putting words on paper.

So I read scripts, quite a few of them, and what a difference it made! In the first place, I began to understand what scripts were, how they were written, and how I could write one of my own. In the second place and at least as important, my reading of film scripts made a significant change in my perception when I looked at a film in a theater. My perspective was changed, and I’d look at the movie and mentally translate it back into the script it had come from.

This didn’t make me a screenwriter. I did write a movie script, and a treatment for another movie, and in the course of doing this I learned that I wasn’t really cut out to be a screenwriter and didn’t really want to be one, for any of a variety of perfectly sound reasons. But I still watch films with a heightened awareness of the underlying screenplay, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this has paid some dividends in my prose writing.

In the same fashion, the best preparation for writing an outline is reading outlines, not reading novels. By studying the outlines themselves you will see how an outline looks on a typed page; as important, you will develop the ability to see other novels — and, ultimately, your own novel — with x-ray eyes; i.e., you’ll see through the prose and dialogue to the bare bones beneath.

How do you outline another person’s novel? Whatever way you wish. Your outline of somebody else’s book can be as sketchy or as detailed as you like, just as the outline you eventually work up for your own novel may be sketchy or detailed, brief or lengthy. Do whatever seems most natural to you.

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with outlines of other writers’ novels — or once you’ve decided not to bother with that step — it’s time to get to work on your own outline. At this point some warm-up exercises and wind sprints can be useful. Few of us would care to do as much pre-outline work as Richard S. Prather describes, with preparatory writing running to almost double the length of the finished book, but one can do as much as seems useful.

Character sketches are handy, for example. In the preceding chapter I mentioned how the evolution of my Matthew Scudder character was facilitated by the memo I wrote to myself, in which I discussed Scudder at some length, talking about his background, his habits, his current way of life, his likes and dislikes, and how he likes his eggs for breakfast. In his journals, Chekhov suggests that a writer ought to know everything he can about a character — his shoe size, the condition of his liver, lungs, clothes, habits, and intestinal track. You may not mention the greater portion of this in your writing, but the better you know your characters the more effectively you’ll be able to write about them. I always keep learning new things about my characters as I go along; I’m still learning about Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, even after several books about each of them — but the better I know them in advance, the better equipped I am for outlining and, later, for writing the novel.

It’s also occasionally helpful to write an answer to the question “What is this book about?” In the early days of Hollywood, the conventional wisdom held that a story line ought to be capable of being conveyed in a single sentence. While I suspect this theory was originally propounded by illiterates who couldn’t hold more than one sentence in their heads at a time, and while it unquestionably overstates the case, there’s some merit to the argument. If nothing else, one feels more confident about approaching a book when one is able to say, if only to oneself, what the thing is about.

That’s what one novel is about, all in one sentence, cumbersome though that sentence be. Explaining what your book is to be about may take several sentences or paragraphs. It’s possible, certainly, to write a book without consciously knowing in advance what it’s to be about; sometimes we write the books in order to answer that very question. And it’s possible to know what the book’s about without spelling it out on paper. But sometimes getting it down improves one’s grasp on the whole thing.

The next step is to write the outline itself, in as much or as little detail as you wish. I have frequently found it useful to make this a chapter outline, with a paragraph given to describe the action that will take place in each chapter. If you take this approach, don’t be unduly concerned with just how you’ll divide your narrative into chapters. When you do the actual writing, you may very well discover that the breaks come naturally in different places than the outline indicated. You’ll simply ignore the division in the outline and do them whatever way seems best. This is just one way in which you’ll ultimately feel free to deviate from the outline, as we’ll see in due course. Writing the outline chapter by chapter, whether or not the book will correspond to this division, introduces a sense of order; I think that’s why I’ve found it valuable.

How detailed should the outline be? Given the premise that this is an individual matter, infinitely variable from one author to another and from one book to the next, we might go on to say that there ought to be enough detail so that the story line makes sense. Outlining rarely amounts to more than putting on paper a plot that is already completely formed in your head. As you write things out, chapter by chapter, scene by scene, you’ll be working out the details of the story as you go. Problems that wouldn’t occur to you otherwise will present themselves.

You’ll work out the solutions to some of these problems in the course of completing the outline. But you won’t work out all of them this way, and it’s important to recognize that you don’t have to. Simply by spotting and defining a problem you have taken a step toward its solution. From then on, your unconscious mind (and your conscious mind as well, for that matter) will be able to play with the problem. While you write the early chapters, you’ll have the plot and structure problems of future chapters somewhere in the back of your mind. In other words, the outlining process is part of the whole organic evolution of the book. The book grows and takes shape during it, and the book will continue to grow and shape itself as a result of it.

It’s possible, I think, for an outline to be too detailed. And it’s also possible to waste time and words in an outline explaining motives and background excessively. One thing to remember, in this sort of outline, is that you’re writing this for your own benefit, not for anybody else to read. That being the case, you don’t have to explain and justify things to yourself when you already have a sufficient grasp of them. Writing is liveliest when it’s interesting to the person doing it. Purposeless elaboration in an outline is one way to kill your own interest in what you will later have to sit down and write.

I don’t really know that that’s the question with words; it seems to me that words work best for me if I take care to employ them more or less in accordance with accepted English usage. With outlines, however, it’s important that the writer be the master of the situation.

That, I think, is the chief danger of outlines — that one can feel bound by them. Remember, the book continues to grow and define itself after the outline has been written, and this process continues during the writing itself. It’s important that you feel free to give your imagination its head. If you can think of a more interesting development, a sounder resolution for Chapter Six, or even a wholly different course for the book to take somewhere along the way, you have to be able to chuck the outline and do whatever’s best for the book.

Some writers avoid putting their plots down on paper because an outline confines them in this fashion. I lean in this direction myself, and rarely write an outline nowadays unless I’m using it to nail down a contract. Other writers do write out an outline but then put it in a drawer and avoid referring to it during the actual writing of the book.

Robert Ludlum takes this approach. As he explained in an interview published in Writer’s Digest,

So far we have been talking about an outline strictly as an author’s aid — something you write before you write the book itself, for the purpose of making the book stronger and the writing easier. Along the way, however, I’ve alluded a couple of times to an outline which has another purpose, that of persuading a publisher to offer a contract for a book which has not yet been written.

Writers who have established themselves professionally rarely write a complete book without having made arrangements for its publication somewhere along the line. When one is of sufficient stature, it’s not even necessary to have a specific idea for a novel in order to get a publisher’s signature on a contract; when one has no track record whatsoever, most publishers would prefer to have a completed manuscript in hand before making any commitment.

I would strongly advise a first novelist to finish at the very least the first draft of his book before making any attempt to sell it. Almost any publisher will look at a neophyte’s chapters and outline, but he’s unlikely to offer a contract on that basis. Why should he? He has no reason to assume the unproven writer has the capacity to finish the book, to sustain whatever strengths the chapters and outline display. If he is sufficiently attracted by what he sees, he may gamble to the extent of offering far less generous terms than he would for a completed manuscript.

But that’s not the main reason why I would recommend writing the whole book first. More often than not, any interruption in the writing of a novel is a mistake. A loss of momentum can sometimes be fatal. If the book’s going well, for heaven’s sake stay with it. If it’s not going well, figure out what’s wrong and deal with it; bundling it off to a publisher isn’t going to solve your problems. A couple of times, when I had sent chapters and outline to a publisher, I kept right on with the writing of the book while awaiting word on the portion I’d submitted. In some instances that I can recall, I had the book completed before the publisher made up his mind.

When you do reach a point in your career where it’s advantageous to submit an outline, the document you will want to produce is a rather different proposition from the sort you write solely for your own benefit. Your object in this submitted outline is to convince another person — the editor or publisher — that you have a sound grasp of the book and will be able to complete a novel which will fulfill the promise of its opening chapters. A successful outline of this sort gives whoever reads it the impression that the book’s already there in your mind, fully realized, just waiting for you to tap it out on the typewriter keys.

When it comes to clinching a sale, long, detailed outlines are best. There are two reasons for this, one logical and the other human. The logical one is that the more substance and detail you include in an outline, the more the editor is able to know about what you intend to do in the material to come, and thus the better able he is to judge whether the book you will write will be a book he would want to publish.

The other reason is rather less firmly rooted in logic. Editors are people, too — hard as I occasionally find it to admit this. If they are going to commit their firm to the purchase of a novel in progress, and if they are going to lay substantial cash on the table as an advance to bind the deal, they like to feel they are getting something tangible for their money. A fifty-page outline, comprehensive enough to be what the film industry delights in calling a “treatment,” has some heft to it. You don’t even have to read it to know there’s something there; just weighing it in your hand will get that message across. And, by George, you can tell that the author put in some time writing it. It’s infinitely different from a one-page synopsis that he could have batted out in eighteen-and-a-half minutes on a rainy afternoon. Never mind that the one-page synopsis might be as much as he’d need to have a firm grasp on the remainder of the novel — anyone would be more comfortable dealing on the basis of a fifty-page treatment.

Just how long and detailed an “outline-for-submission” must be varies greatly with circumstances. Random House contracted for my third mystery novel about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr on the basis of a one-page letter to my editor, Barbé Hammer. In the letter I told her the book’s basic premise and some of the general avenues I intended to explore. There was nothing in the letter to show that I knew how to resolve the plot complications I intended to develop, and there was considerable vagueness even in the opening premise — I said, for instance, that Bernie was going to be hired to steal a particular collector’s item, from one enthusiast for another’s benefit, but I didn’t say what the gimcrack would be because I admittedly hadn’t yet decided.

I got by with this rather cavalier approach because of the particular circumstances that were operating. Barbé knew and liked my work. Random House had already published two books about Bernie and folks there were pleased with them aesthetically and commercially. All I really had to do to get a contract was indicate that I had a sound idea for a book, that it was sufficiently “the same only different” to continue the series, and that I at least was confident of my ability to tie everything up neatly by the end of the book.

In contrast, my outline for my World War II novel ran a dozen or so pages and was as detailed as I could comfortably arrange. In this instance I was offering to write a book of a sort with which I had no real prior experience, and a more substantial outline was necessary not only to convince a publisher that I knew what I was setting out to do but to make me similarly confident. Before I began a 500-page monster of a novel, I wanted to assure myself that I wouldn’t wind up somewhere around page 374 having painted myself into some plotting corner. In retrospect, I wish I’d written this particular outline two or three or four times as long; had I done so, I might have had an easier time of writing the book.

To sum up:

An outline is a tool, the equivalent of a painter’s preliminary sketches. Use it to whatever extent it is helpful. Don’t be a slave to it; if the book begins to grow away from the outline, let the book chart its own course.

Above all, remember there’s no one right way to do it. You can sit down with no outline whatsoever and write the whole book from first page to last. Or you can write a one-page synopsis, expand it into a chapter outline, expand that into a detailed chapter outline with each scene sketched in, and even expand that outline into a super-treatment with bits of dialogue included and point-of-view changes indicated. Some writers operate this way, blowing up the balloon of their novel one breath at a time, until the writing of the novel’s actual first draft is just a matter of doubling the length of the final outline. If that’s what works for them, then that’s the right way to do it — for them.

Finally, for anyone interested in the best illustration I can recall of what an outline is and how it all works, I would recommend Donald E. Westlake’s hilarious novel, Adios, Scheherazade. The narrator is a hapless hack who has written a sex novel a month for the past twenty-eight months and who confronts a massive writer’s block when he attempts to write Opus Twenty-Nine. At one point he produces an outline for the book, an outline that’s very instructive to any apprentice novelist while it finds its way to one of the funniest punchlines I ever read. I can’t reproduce it here, but I earnestly commend the book to your attention.