On Outlining

(Photo by Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

We're well into day two of Brig's Typewriter Crisis (uppercase required, members of the press take note), and my brain is only getting more and more broken by the minute. The typewriter sits on the floor in its scuffed-up case, the seven typed pages of my incomplete novelette "Treatment" sitting on top of it. It yells for me, pleading to know when it will be in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing. Soon, I tell it, soon, everything in time. But secretly, I am just as uncertain as it is.

Well anyway, as I'm reporting live from my personal writing apocalypse, I've managed to do some good research and thinking on the process of writing.

A lot of this today has been about outlining. In terms of my writing, My first feature screenplay (titled Our Fightin' Boys) was outlined using Dan Harmon's Story Circle. For those who don't know, Dan Harmon is a writer, the creator of Community (one of my favorite TV shows of all time) and an absolute genius. The Story Circle is essentially a revised take on the monomyth that strips away specific events happening and broadens the scope to what the main character desires. It's a remarkably accessible and adaptable way to outline stories, though I sometimes found myself feeling somewhat boxed-in by it. I have a general distrust of rigid outlining methods, and though the Story Circle is by far the one I would recommend, I'm not sure if I plan on putting it to use again for a large project.

My second feature screenplay (titled A Good Day to Make a Friend) ditched the Story Circle, and in its place I used an unstructured bulleted list of plot points, which I vaguely shoehorned into well-paced "acts" during the writing process. I played fairly loose with the points, altering them when I felt they needed to go another direction. I'm not sure I can attribute it to the outlining process, but in the end I was far more satisfied with A Good Day to Make a Friend than I was with Our Fightin' Boys. Unusually, I don't think it's too many revisions away from a passable final draft, though I have no intentions of working on that anytime soon.

You like that? I could easily bore you with more descriptions of how I outlined my other works (including my terrible, never-to-be-read-by-anyone-myself-included NaNoWriMo 2022 novel), but I'm not going to do that.

I've been thinking about this a lot today because I took some time and read Brandon Sanderson's extensive FAQ entry about outlining. Full disclosure: as of this writing, I have never read a book by Mr. Sanderson (though I intend to soon as I hear only good things about his work, and he seems like a remarkably cool guy), but his takedown of the two different ways of outlining is gold. "All of the time that the outliner spends up front preparing, the freewriter has to spend on the back-end rewriting," he says. This is incredibly true.

I've been taking the freewriter route with the writing of "Treatment," and honestly, it's kind of daunting to me. I see no way to a finished product but going back to the beginning and rewriting once the first draft is done. I don't exactly want to do that. That being said, freewriting just feels more natural to me than creating a rigid outline that determines every second of the story. So I really don't know what to do. I may be encouraged to give some form of outlining a shot soon, but I worry that it may be a "once a freewriter, always a freewriter" kind of deal. We'll see.

So those are some of my "typewriter is broken" thoughts and rantings, unordered and unedited as they get. This is what I'm doing to prevent myself from going insane with sorrow over my machine's injury. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, but until then, you're gonna have to deal with a lot of posts like this. How fun for you!