Maybe you travel with a road map, or maybe you like to wander a bit and see where it takes you.
“I never outline new projects, so that’s the first thing to say. I sort of feel like structure is something you discover rather than superimpose and my idea there is that superimposition makes the writing process secondary to the drafting process, if you will, the sort of blueprint process. And I don’t want to have to sit at the keyboard and act like a slave to some outline. I think that that makes the work structurally manipulative in a way. I can’t learn things about the characters. I can’t discover aspects of them I didn’t know about earlier on if this character absolutely has to go to the shopping mall and pull out a submachine gun. You know? If I’ve already decided that’s the case, there’s nothing in the process that’s magical or surprising to me and I don’t want to be in that position.” — Rick Moody, Big Think, July 28, 2010
When you write, do you need to know what happens next? Or do you write to surprise yourself? Share your thoughts in the comment section.
MAD about Words
is the brainchild (and heartchild) of
Mary Ann de Stefano
{ 9 comments }
Mr. Moody makes a lot of sense in his argument to chuck the outline, though he’s obviously speaking from a fiction writing perspective. I agree there’s no better way to discover characters than through surprise and letting a story grow organically, and that this approach is absolutely the most gratifying method of writing. While I understand that fiction writing is the context of Mr. Moody’s post, I think it’s worth noting that needing a structure or having to know what happens next depends on the kind of writing. Movies and plays demand tight adherence to structure, so do poems other than free-verse, essays, and it would seem non-fiction comes with structure already intact. So for those fiction writers who like to dabble in genres outside of their lifeblood, it’s not safe to subscribe to a total, “I don’t outline” philosophy. I’ve tried this before with drastic results.
As Gomer used to say Suprise, Suprise, Suprise. Once the basic concept is hatched you never know how the children will turn out. An example in my lastest manuspript I eluded to a character known only as the Dragon, a bad character and killer in a Chinese gang, well it turns out she is a woman and now I have a sequel idea for a follow up novel with the same main character for a Homicide detective series. Outlines are for school, before you learn to form ideas within a central idea or a scientific treatise. I like to go comando always!
I agree with Rick Moody one hundred percent. The great writer axiom “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” comes to bear. Line by line down inside the paragraphs of stories are small miracles that arrive suddenly as one works. They are everywhere in a piece of fiction. They are the interaction of author’s brain, heart, and soul with the story he is writing, the lines he’s putting down on the page. I believe Hemingway, and many other writers, came to a time in their writing when this electric connection to the process and the page wasn’t firing anymore, and it felt to them like it was gone permanently, and their despair about that contributed to the miracle not returning to them — their darkest hour. I believe it could return unless, as in Hemingway’s case, there was actual physical damage preventing.
One more thing. My paragraph above makes writing a story seem like “free writing” or Freud’s term “free association.” There is, as part of the writing process, plenty of planning ahead and thinking ahead and sometimes “having to know what’s ahead.” It is just that the writer can’t be closed to opportunities that arise as he writes, risks and whimsy and sudden logical options that come up from the page that he could never have foreseen. Being open to those, letting those breathe magic into the work, being in a state of mind where the plans and the surprises are all clicking together — that is surely what the real writer goes to work table to find in himself, and each time he finds it it is the core reassurance and encouragement to keep writing.
I do both. When I have a deadline, I need an outline. That way, I don’t end up staring at the wall for hours, waiting for my sluggish muse to kick in. However, when I don’t have a deadline, the staring at the wall part is almost enjoyable.
Hi Mary Ann,
I don’t outline. In my writings I have relatively strong concepts of the beginning, end and general plot. I know where the story begins and usually where I want to go, but leave the paths, obstacles and many characters and events open to discovery. It’s definitely one of the most entertaining aspects of the process to find new diversions, challenges and words that sprout seemingly out of the ether. My characters tend to have their own idea of their journeys and it’s intriguing and fun to let them lead me.
Thanks for the blog.
Troy Michael
“words are the chariots of our imagination”
I think one must be a tad prone to multiple-personality disorder to be a writer. (Who me?) (No, not you, ME.) (Oh. Okay then.) For example, in Deja Vu Dream, I knew I wanted my characters to get together. But how? They were from opposite ends of the social spectrum. That’s when you play the ‘What if…” game. I came up with a kidnapping, and then worked up an outline backward and forward from there. If you ‘become’ your character, you may know his/her responses in most situations, but every so often they surprise you, and you have to write pretty fast to catch up with them. At one point, Me#1 was saying, “Kill him, kill him! He’s gotta die!” Me#2 sat at the keyboard trying to see through a blur of tears as I alternated typing and filling the wastebasket with used tissues. I love writing…but sometimes it’s tough on my Kleenex budget.
I like to start out with notes or even a cell-phone voice memo. I use an outline in Excel that’s part storyboard, part flowchart, part a place to put things (research, notes, pictures off the Web, links). I think of it more as a scratch pad than a straitjacket, a place to go when I need to zoom out from the page or when I just have to power through a first draft so I can have something complete to revise. At all times it’s a point of departure. I think I’m more likely to become detrimentally enamored of something I’ve hit upon in actual writing than something I pondered in an outline.
The only time I’ve tried to use an outline was when I was told by a teacher I could think ahead on stories and maybe save myself some time. I went by her instructions and those pages are still only written out ideas sitting in a notebook somewhere. I do like to keep notebooks of pictures and things, sort of like Mary does, and I do think part of writing is thinking ahead, as Phil has suggested. And I think a part of why outlining has not worked for me in the past is that writing is so much about voice and word choice, and Phil has said something about this, that it is the building of stories, one word or phrase upon other words or phrases. I usually struggle a long time before I can find that one voice that will convey my story, a sort of vague idea of what I have in mind. And then it takes a long time of hacking through the available material from the several initial drafts before a structure appears, maybe a structure that looks completely different from the original. I don’t like to think of this all as a waste of time. I chose to think of it as building scaffolding on which a story can hang. Sometimes it takes me a long time to finish my stories, so I’m usually moving ahead with no guarantees of when or if it will all come together, or if it will be very beautiful when complete.
Outlines or not.
I have only been writing a short time and was taught to follow the outline. I have to say if you need to come up with a subject and are unsure in the beginning this is a good way to go. Although, at other times I feel as if this can hamper creative flow and chuck it altogether.
On the other other hand, when I tried to free flow, so to speak, on my first rough draft of my book, I felt as if I was out in the middle of the ocean at times without a boat.
There is no set time along the way as far as I’m concerned whether you need it or not…it’s just nice to know you can use if you have to.