Confessions of a Former Anti-Outliner
By Matthew Norman | March 31, 2020 |
Please welcome novelist Matthew Norman to Writer Unboxed today! Matthew’s first novel, Domestic Violets, was nominated in the Best Humor Category at the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards, and his second novel, We’re All Damaged, was an Amazon bestseller. His new novel, Last Couple Standing, is available now. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Baltimore, Maryland and holds an MFA from George Mason University.
We’re thrilled to have him with us today to talk about something many of us dread — outlining — and how he not only survived the experience, but thrived because of it.
Learn more about Matthew by following him on Twitter and Instagram.
Confessions of a Former Anti-Outliner
A couple of summers ago, when my agent sold my new novel, Last Couple Standing, she also sold my next novel, which I hadn’t written yet. Here’s a summary of the conversations that followed.
Agent: “Guess what! They want your next book, too!”
Me: “Wait, my what now?”
Agent: “Yep. And, they’ve asked for an outline.”
Me: “An outline? Come on. Do I really have to do one of those?”
New Publisher: “Yes—and we can’t stress this enough—you do.”
Here’s the thing, though. At that point in my career, which included three completed novels, I was firmly against outlining. My theory, based on nothing but my own gut instincts, was that committing to a plot before writing a single line of prose would be stifling. I had an analogy for it and everything. It’d be like setting out on a road trip while wearing horse blinders. Wouldn’t I miss all the cool, weird, hidden little things along the way?
To those of you reading this who just loudly called me an idiot, touché. Perhaps you’re done here, because you’ve already figured this out for yourselves. But, for the anti-outliners among us, I’m writing today to report that I was wrong. Outlining my next novel was one of the most productive exercises of my entire writing life. It was creatively exciting, legitimately fun, and it led to the fastest, most complete first draft that I’ve ever written.
Here are the steps that I took along the way. Hopefully, they’ll help you successfully outline and then write your next novel.
1. START WITH EVENTS ON NOTECARDS
Many authors will tell you that the toughest part of writing a first draft is figuring out the plot. Something happens, and then something else happens, and then more things happen because of those first things, and then everything somehow fits together. I know; it can be overwhelming. I’m getting anxious just thinking about it.
The solution—aside from mood stabilizers—is to give yourself time to lay out the incidents and events that will make up the plot of your novel, and to acknowledge to yourself that those incidents and events won’t arrive in your imagination in any particular chronological order.
For example, let’s say your main characters are Jim and Amanda. You may know that Jim and Amanda will find themselves back in New York City toward the beginning of your novel. However, you may not yet know what will lead them there. You may also know that a lengthy flashback will appear in which an eight-year-old Jim breaks his arm at recess. However, you may have zero clue where that flashback will go in your novel. You may have your ending all figured out, but the important two or three events that will occur just before that ending may be a total mystery.
To embrace all of this beautiful randomness, I recommend using simple note cards. Here’s how it works. As you brainstorm ideas for incidents and events, write your ideas down, one event per card. And, remember, in this stage, there are no bad ideas, and chronology doesn’t matter. Every flashback. Every conversation. Every car ride, argument, dog attack, stolen kiss, trip down the stairs, chance encounter, pivotal embarrassment, drunken dinner party, and heated phone call. Everything gets a card. Then, once you have a nice, significant stack of cards to work with, spread them out on a table and begin arranging them in whatever order makes the most sense.
It may seem messy, and some of your cards will eventually be tossed out in disgust, but what you’ll be looking at here is the plot of your novel. You’ll begin to see what’s working, and, just as important, you’ll be able to identify and fill the holes in your plot.
Jim has just lost his job. Out of desperation, he reaches out to his old roommate who now teaches at NYU. That’s what leads Jim and Amanda back to New York. You just figured all of that out while staring at your note cards.
2. OPEN A DOCUMENT AND START GETTING SPECIFIC
Now, with your plot shaping up nicely, it’s time to open your computer and start making your pretend people and fake events feel real. I recommend naming this document something creative and sexy, like, “Outline_v1” or “<Title>_Outline.”
Start by typing out your note cards in the order you’ve chosen. Before, in the Note Card Stage, you had permission to be all vague and “brainstormy.” Now, though, it’s time to dig in and get specific. That means that you’re no longer allowed to say something like, “Jim and Amanda have an argument and then a dog bites Jim.” Instead, you’re saying, “Jim and Amanda have a heated fight about exactly where to sprinkle Amanda’s dad’s ashes, the bleachers at Yankee stadium or outside Central Park. Then a corgi escapes from the nearby dog park and bites Jim’s ankle, tearing his only nice pair of pants. Now he’s stressed because he has a job interview at NYU in 20 minutes and his pants are ripped.”
Writing such specific details while outlining may seem limiting, but, I promise you, it isn’t. The work you do here will help provide context for when you actually start writing your first draft. And, as you do, if you’ve outlined well, you’ll find yourself writing more clearly and more precisely, because you’ve already done so much of the hard work up front. Instead of getting bogged down in the mechanics of your plot, you’ll be able to focus on who your characters are, how they sound, and how they interact with each other. You know: the fun stuff.
3. COMMIT TO YOUR PLOT, BUT BE FLEXIBLE
Because that’s the big knock on outlining, right? That’s why you were so scared of it in the first place. It’s too rigid. Too prescribed. Well, it doesn’t have to be.
Let’s revisit our road trip analogy from before. If you’re driving down I-95 and you see a ten-car pile-up in front of you, you’re not going to go speeding right into it, right? Of course not. You’re going to hit the brakes and find an alternate route. Same goes for writing your first draft.
Once your outline is set—your roadmap written—commit to its contents and trust that you’ve done good work. However, don’t be so maniacal about it that you refuse to adjust when necessary. If you have a great idea in the middle of writing chapter four that you hadn’t considered during the Note Card and Outlining Stages, go with it and adjust your outline accordingly. Or, if the opposite occurs and you find yourself horribly stuck in the middle of chapter thirteen, stop and consider finding another way.
4. RELAX, BECAUSE YOU’RE JUST GOING TO REWRITE IT ALL ANYWAY
The job of an outline is to help you write the best first draft that you can in, reasonably speaking, the shortest amount of time possible. However, no matter how brilliant, thorough, and thought-through your outline is, your first draft is still going to be…well, a first draft.
Consequently, some sections will be comprised of the best writing you’ve ever done. Other sections will be an absolute disaster. Halfway through, for no apparent reason, your character Jim will have his named changed to Steve. There will be way too much of some things, and not nearly enough of other things. One chapter will stop for no reason, there will be more typos than you can imagine, and, at some point, apropos of nothing, Amanda will become a redhead.
Don’t worry; this is all perfectly normal. You can fix it in your second draft. And then in your third draft. And, <sigh>, your seventh. In other words: you’re just getting started.
Have additional tips to share, or cautions, or stories from the trenches? The floor is yours.
Matthew Norman is the author of five novels. His latest, Charm City Rocks, is out now from Dell. His debut novel, Domestic Violets, was nominated in the Best Humor Category at the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards, and his second novel, We’re All Damaged, was an Amazon bestseller. His upcoming novel, Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, will be out in October. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Baltimore and holds an MFA from George Mason University.
The merest mention of the word “outline” brings back horrible memories of all those compulsory directives in school: I, A, i, a, complete with progressively rightward-moving indentations. For some arbitrary and undisclosed reason, this structure had to be imposed on existing content. Needless to say, I always got it wrong. (If I go on with this tender reminiscence I will have nightmares tonight.)
Here is a nice practical effective method that suits people like me with flighty minds! Thanks, Matthew.
This is a great reminder, thanks! I’m something of a planner, if not a major outliner, but lately I’ve been doing lots of what I think of as prewriting: freewriting character notes, story ideas. I’ve got a fresh stack of note cards waiting for…what, when I’ve figured out the plot?
In fact there are moments and scenes like the ones you describe that are currently lurking either in my head or in those pages of freewriting. While I continue to wrestle with some of the big questions/mysteries of the plot, there’s no reason I couldn’t get the rest mapped onto cards. Perhaps I’ll even see that what I’m perceiving as *big* gaps are actually a series of smaller ones.
Yeah, all that indenting and lower casing…no way.
“Outlining my next novel was one of the most productive exercises of my entire writing life. It was creatively exciting, legitimately fun, and it led to the fastest, most complete first draft that I’ve ever written.”
This.
I’m a short-story and nonfiction writer and sell stuff based on a detailed outline. I do this naturally because it organizes my thoughts and I can see whether I’m presenting in a logical order. And it’s so great being able to see the entire narrative arc. The only novel that I finished, that I’m happy with, that I published, is one where I followed the process for my nonfiction.
I like using notecards too. I try to add the emotion and draw (stick figures) for the action.
My first draft is about telling myself the story, in the same way a kid might tell you this happened, then that, because, and so, etc. That helps getting away from the rigid outline.
It’s nice meeting another outliner-advocate! Congratulations on Last Couple Standing and your other novels. I will look them up.
Thanks. I like that line…”My first draft is about telling myself the story.” That’s really smart.
I love the note card idea. I found some dry-erase cards that stick to any surface, including walls. Yep, Amazon. This would be a perfect use for those, thank you. Great usable tips.
Thanks! Those dry-erase cards sound cool.
HI, Matthew:
Welcome to WU. Excellent post.
I’m an outliner who tried to pants it with this last novel, only to find myself consumed in a whirlwind of stuff that I had to stand back from and ask, “Wait. Once again–what’s the story?”
This is why I love your final remark under Item #1, which is looking at those isolated events and trying to find the causality that makes them necessary links in a chain of compelling events.
That sound easier than it is.
I have a very gifted student right now who developed a very complicated story world and had a string of events that in fact we’re getting in the way of her seeing the really compelling story she had, if she simply focused on her protagonist. Specifically, she needed to honor the emotional weight of the woman’s guilt, and the terrible choice she has to make between seeking to atone for a grave mistake she made or settle simply for revenge. What does that mean? What is the difference in terms of the effect on a human heart between atonement and revenge? What if events force the choice?
Once that story line became clear, a lot of the events seemed a lot less interesting (i.e., unnecessary), and the story world clearly needed to be stripped down to its essentials as they related to the journey she now had her protagonist on.
So I would add, in Item #1, when trying to find the story that links your events into a compelling dramatic, causal chain, find the story. What is your protagonist’s challenge? How can I make it profound? How can I raise the stakes, etc.
And, of course, Item #4 is the clincher.
Great stuff. Thanks!
So true, Mr. Corbett. The heart of story is not events but a protagonist’s struggle with himself. Without that, a novel is just a bunch of stuff that happens and who cares about that?
David, this kind of analysis is what deepens those revisions. My historical that’s a mess has so many layers to it and with every reiteration, I’ve been able to go deeper to the emotional core. Don’s book is coming in very handy. He asks such good questions!
Yep. Good thought. The challenge and motivation are so important, and they sometimes take some time to reveal themselves. I just had a discussion about that with my editor last week. “What does she really want?” It’s taken me a completed first draft to figure that out.
OMG, ROTFL, STFU you’re killing me. “Brainstormy!” Maybe it’s cabin fever, but your post cracked me up.
But you know, those are practical suggestions. I was a longtime outliner who went the other way and became a seat of the pants purist…okay “pure” and “seat the pants” don’t go together, I realize that, but you see.
The notecard method you describe is a concrete way to do what most pants writers do, which is not completely freeform but which relies on “marker moments”, meaning known events or even images that are the milestone markers of what eventually will be a fully mapped plot.
Lewis and Clark traveled first and mapped later, but they did have two foundational ideas: Go west. Find sea. That’s not much of an outline, but its a starting point on which to build as much as one can know in advance.
So, here’s my twist on this topic. I just completed a draft of a WIP, and this one was written like a patchwork quilt: whole scenes that felt like they should be there, but with no idea of how they would stitch together or what sort of picture they would make. I didn’t even have an idea of the novel’s category.
Here’s the amazing thing: in the end, the pieces of the quilt all work together beautifully. It’s as if my unconscious mind had the whole scheme already worked out. It’s not a genre piece, more of a literary love story with a supernatural element and a John Fowles meta-trick ending. How’s that for clarity?
Seriously, the necessity of an outline for an unknown novel is a publishing challenge as common as two-book contracts. Your postcards prove what outliners know first and pants writers discover last: Whether known or mysterious or disorganized, the novel in your head is a novel.
It will work. You will finish. How you get there is just a detail.
Benjamin, what’s interesting is that some stories come fully formed and others have to be figured out–my hands often know far more than my brain so I’m learning to write without an outline. It’s still kind of scary though, the places my hand will take me…
Very true. For me, I kind of stumbled into outlining. Basically, I was told, in a nice way, that I had to do it. I would’ve finished a draft without an outline, I’m sure. It just probably would’ve taken me a lot longer.
Hey, Mathew (that’s a Georgia hello)
I find this funny because at first I was an outliner. Then I became more of a seat-of-the pants writer. Now on my 11th book, which I sold on a short synopsis and three completed chapters, I find I’m starting to go back to outlining. Full circle.
Hi. I think I’ll be a full outliner from here on out. It just really works for me.
OMG, thank you! As a successful mystery author who outlines, I often find myself on the defensive, literally attacked by pantsers. “It’s not organic!” “If I’m not surprised, my readers won’t be!” 1) It absolutely IS organic, just at a different point in the process. And 2) those surprises are gone once you finish the draft. I’ve created a workshop called “The Organics of Outlining” to address this divide. And one of the most important aspects of it harkens to your third point. You should never become a prisoner of your outline. That’s why I call mine a fluid outline – aka, flexible.
PREACH!
My penmanship is execrable, so notecards are out (yes, I cannot read my own handwriting even minutes’ later). After discarding the detestable & user-antagonistic Scrivener, I am now using reliable Evernote–‘works everywhere, all the time–& taking advantage of its simple numbering and bullet point options. It’s simple to make a quick & dirty chronology with each numbered bullet maxing out at 3 words, maybe 4, & they can be changed in order any time without the endless rewrites. Best: they’re always as close as my phone, laptop, desktop…whatever. My whole novel in a skinny column at a glance, in any way of breaking it up that works for the moment. I’ll never go back.