The Outline

I know you hate to outline. Do it all the same.

Dream, Story, Performance

In ‘How Dull Can You Get’ a couple of days ago, I wrote about the 3 stages of composing a tale. They are:

1. Dream the setting, characters, events.
2. Structure the events into a tale.
3. Perform the structure into a finished tale for us in the audience to hear and love.

The second stage, where you structure the events and shape the characters’ squarish pegs into the roundish holes of the narrative, is where you actually coin the tale or story. The story is complete in the structure stage; what you add in the performance is the wit, the polish, and the effects of your style. In a word, you heighten the tale’s effectiveness. But the tale already exists in the outline you create when you have done with structuring the tale.

‘But I Hate to Outline!’

This is what many of us talesmen say. It’s true, I hate to outline. I think most writers do. And I expect that most of us just skim over the outline phase. Some of us, like Diana Wynne-Jones, have the barest sort of outline imaginable: she writes that she only has three scenes in her outline, which she keeps in her head: the start, the end, and one standout scene in the middle. When Ms Wynne-Jones composes her first draft, then, she sets down her starting scene, then ‘works her way’ toward the goal of that middle scene, from which she proceeds to work her way toward the end scene.

She says she ends up with a mess of a first draft, which she then works over and over to set into a coherent tale.

Other writers will do with even less of an outline than Ms Wynne-Jones. Leigh Douglass Brackett just made it up as she went along. She also ended up with many tales she had to abandon, reaching insolvable points in the story, or deciding the tale had nowhere to go at all.

Making the outline does render the act of performing the first draft less exciting, suspenseful, or surprising. The first draft sinks into more of a mechanical filling-in of details left out of the outline.

But. But. But…

If You Can’t Make an Outline, You Don’t Know Your Story

Leigh Douglass Brackett ended up often enough finding out she had no tale at all. Diana Wynne-Jones ended up with a first draft that needed an outline of its own for her to learn what story it was she had told.

Simply put: the outline is your story.

Pyramid or Less Than Useful

There are of course different sorts of outlines. The least-formed is a simple list:

• This happened at the start
• Then this happened
• Then that happened
• Meanwhile this other happened
• Then this thing happened
• Because of all this, that happened
• Finally, the end happened

This is not right. It is better than no notion at all of your tale, and it is better than the bare minimum of Ms Wynne-Jones. But it doesn’t help you to understand what story it is that you are telling.

So you really are aiming at a hierarchical, or pyramidal or top-down outline. Or a series of outlines à la the ‘Snowflake Method’ in which you summarize your tale in one sentence, then in a paragraph, then in five paragraphs, then in five pages.

You must understand what is at the heart of your tale if you are to make up your mind which scenes to include and which scenes to leave out.

In the Beginning, All Was Calm

The hero was calm

His town was calm

The people around him were as they always were

Then Something Happened that got the Hero in a Box

This happened

The hero ignored it

It got worse

The hero tried to get the town to take care of it

No good; the hero knew he was in trouble and would have to take care of it himself

The Struggle Began Badly

The hero tried something

It failed

Things got even worse

The hero tried something else

… And so on. Here I show only two levels, comparable to a summary of each sequence, and the main events within that sequence. Of course a fully ordered outline will have one Master Line that tells the whole tale, then each Act will have its line, each Sequence within the Acts will have its line, each main event will have its line, and each minor event within each main event will have its line. There may be even lower-levels than that.

The talesman who masters this sort of an outline can tell you his tale in a single line, the Master Line, easily and off the top of his head. Ask him to elaborate, and he can give you the tale in a handful of sentences, one for each act.

Thus he knows precisely what is the tale he tells.

And thus he is capable of performing that tale, rather than another tale entirely while he imagines he is telling you the tale he claims he is.

Yes, outlines are hard, and not very gratifying to most of us. They are rather like the work the painter must undergo to prepare his canvas, his brushes, his pigments, along with all his preparatory sketches. Task-work, toil, drudgery. But if the painter neglects this (as unhappily many 20th century artists did) then his masterpieces will fall to pieces in a few years.

Do it right if you want to build a tale that can last.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, June 26, 2008)