How Important Are Outlines?
Out of everything I’ve read about writing well and outlining, “On Writing” by Stephen King was probably the most influential on my writing process. As such, you can imagine my shock when I read just how strong of an opinion King had against outlining.
I mean, strong is an understatement! He’s called it the last choice of a good writer, and even said they’re “the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.” If I was a beginner writer, I’d be floored and confused. I use outlines. Am I doing it wrong? Are outlines why my drafts feel like they suck? Is he right?
It depends.
Many people go into writing thinking there are objective rules about how things should be done — about how you should go about creating your characters, your worlds, or your plots. In reality, what works best behind the curtains depends on what’s best for you as a writer and as a person.
What works for you is more important than what works for someone else.
For Stephen King, he’s right. Outlines hamper his writing process and lead to stiff and artificial stories. Allowing the characters and the plot to whisk him on a journey is what works for him, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Other authors like Brandon Sanderson outline extensively, because the best way for him to start is to know where he’s going and how to set up the ending he likes, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.
If you’re familiar with writing, you’ve probably heard of Planners and Pantsers — people who write “by the seat of their pants” and come up with things on the fly. If you aren’t familiar with writing, go tell someone about the new word you learned today.
Planning and pantsing is more of a scale than a binary, and there’s no wrong side. Both sides can create action-packed, thought-provoking pieces of fiction, and both sides can create stories that hold up as well as melted clay.
How Much Do You Outline?
Personally, I’ve found myself right in the middle! I’ve tried both sides to find out what works for me. For my first series, Mighty Boy, I vividly remember my process being fueled on a few ideas I had for specific set pieces and where I wanted the story to go.
For Spirit Swords, I did something different — I had a plot outline doc that described most of the plot in detail, even mentioning the fourth book in the series that I eventually scrapped.
I outlined The Illruso Heist before I started, too, although that happened across notebook pages, discord servers, and bad MS paint sketches as if I was planning a heist myself.
In the limbo between finishing Fallen Heroes and deciding to publish The Illruso Heist, I actually outlined two whole novel ideas that never came to fruition! I might post about them later, but I scrapped them because I started on Project Fracture, my current work in progress. A friend challenged me to a writing contest, and I started Project Fracture with the idea to try not outlining it.
I didn’t stick with that for long. Trying to write without an outline is what taught me that, while I’m good at coming up with my worlds, my characters, and my magic systems along the way, I need an idea of where the plot’s going to really make progress. I outlined chunks of Project Fracture step by step until I either wrote it all out, got stuck, or came up with a crazy idea.
With a process like that, finishing Project Fracture is how I found what works best for me. Outlining in chunks gave me goalposts to move toward as I wrote the first draft, while still giving me those aha! moments where I realized what should happen next.
It’s still the process I’m using for COUNTER, the LitRPG web novel I post weekly on Royal Road. While I’m editing and releasing Chapter 25, I’ve written up to Chapter 29, and I’ve outlined the skeleton of the entire first major arc. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I’ll figure that out later!
TLDR.
The point of the story is, you have to learn how important outlining is by experimenting to find your comfort zone. The “rules” of writing are what’s best for you, which is why you should accept advice as tools in your toolset to test out rather than gospel. After all — if you tried to follow both Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson’s process, you’d have a hard time simultaneously outlining and not outlining.
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