Tag: book outline

Here is another great post from my old blog, topazadine.com.

In 2022, I tried to write your typical boilerplate samurai novel called Birds of Japan. Standard fare: bisexual daimyō in an arranged marriage with a retainer’s daughter who prefers getting off with his karō (second in command), but slowly comes to love his wife after she helps him defeat a rival lord. Sword fights, gay sex, beheadings, abductions, etc etc, who cares.

I could have made something interesting out of it, especially if I added way more gay sex, but I got 119 pages in and never finished.

Well, that page count is disingenuous. Only 67 of those pages were actual writing.

The rest? All outline.

That’s right. Fifty-seven pages of outline. And there was even more, because I deleted the outline as I went along.

Why is this a problem? It creates a lack of motivation.

Excessive Outlining Tricks Your Brain

In my post about spreadsheet word counts, I discussed intrinsic motivation, which is when you create goals and compete with yourself in order to get more done. The issue is that you can ruin your intrinsic motivation by planning too much.

This is called mental rehearsal, which Dr. Dev Rowchowdhury, a performance psychologist, explains as:

Mental rehearsal involves imagined, mental practice of performing a task as opposed to actual practice. That is, when engaging in mental rehearsal, one imagines performing without having to actually do anything.

Using Mental Rehearsal to Boost Your Performance and Well-Being in Sport and Exercise

This is all well and good for athletes, who cannot be physically performing their chosen sport at all times. Sometimes, they need to think through their actions and envision themselves performing it as they should.

However, it goes out the window for us writers. Yes, we do need some form of mental rehearsal, which we then capture in an outline. But if we fantasize too much, we have made our brain believe we’ve already done it. Given that we don’t need kinesthetic memory but actual execution, over-outlining is deleterious for our craft.

At other times, overplanning might cause analysis paralysis. Jodi Clark, a Licensed Professional Counselor, describes it as thus:

Analysis paralysis refers to overthinking a problem to the point that it becomes more difficult to make a decision. It often happens when people are overwhelmed by their choices or have too much information to sort through before they make a choice. 

What Is Analysis Paralysis? How Overthinking Affects Your Decision Making

In short, you are doing so much thinking and planning that when you need to do the real work, you can’t because you’re overwhelmed by how much you’ve already done.

I think it is a combination of these two factors that leads to the heartbreaking posts from new writers who have spent months, or even years, daydreaming about their characters and planning their book, but then find themselves completely unable to work. They have rehearsed everything so much that now they have no motivation to continue.

But I’m not telling you to completely give up on outlining.

Planning is good, but not good when you become so rigidly obsessed with your outline that you can’t feel creative: now you’re just following orders you gave yourself and providing no space for different execution.

So, as with everything, whether that is descriptive density or characterization, you need to come to balance. How are we going to do that?

Think Once, Outline Twice

For this method, you will have a long outline and a fast outline. The long outline is where you get out every single thing that you want to include in a given scene, chapter, etc. Anything that you know you may want to have happen, you put it here.

As an example, here is part of the long outline I did for my story “Midsummer Nightmare.” This is from Chapter 7.

The words here don’t really matter, so don’t strain your eyes. You just need to see that it’s pretty long, a page for one chapter. I’ve mentioned the conversations, the way that everyone acts, their specific movements that show their emotions, a few snippets of what I intend to write, etc. All very helpful: I can see exactly how the story is going to go.

However, if I work off this, I don’t really have much room for creative freedom. It will feel like I’m plugging in piece after piece, line after line. I may even find myself tempted to tell rather than show because I can no longer visualize things other than what I have already told myself.

When beta reading, I can tell who used long outlines; their sentences read as if they are ripped straight off their planning document. Do not do that. Unless you have written a specific phrase in quotes that you want to use, or a really good piece of dialogue, follow this adage:

What goes in your outline stays in your outline.

You’re not using any of that; it serves as a reminder of what you actually want to write. So, now that you have things set up for yourself (but not written), you want something faster that will not stymie your creative process.

Next, make a fast outline that has only the most relevant plot points.

Much better: only a quarter of a page. I don’t have the action beat for beat, so I know I have to make it up myself in the actual writing. None of this reads as something that would actually happen in the real text (at least, I hope not) because it’s so boring and straightforward.

There are no showing details, almost no dialogue, no real feel for how the scene plays out. Now I feel like I have to get it done myself.

But!

You Still Have Your Long Outline as a Lifeline

Because this fast outline only covers the most general of plot points, you might not include things that you really wanted to add in there, specifically regarding tension, setting, and so on. Thankfully, you’ve got it right there for you in your long outline, which you can scurry back to if you don’t know what to do next.

Sometimes we set things aside for a while and come back utterly bewildered about what we were trying to do, which is where the longer outline comes in.

We can refamiliarize ourselves with what we wanted to do, then put the long outline aside and turn back to the fast outline. This way, we’re not being tricked into thinking we’ve already done all the work.

I have already finished drafting the second book in my trilogy and outlined the third, but I have now hop-skipped back to the first one, tweaking details before I start querying in earnest. To be quite honest, I’ve already forgotten half the stuff that happens in the second book, and the third is just a hazy memory.

But that’s okay! When I’m finally ready to work on Plexity, the third installment, I have my long outline right there. I’ll then cut it down, just as I did before, and I will have a good working knowledge of how I want to proceed.

Many times, the long outline works as a type of “background program” as you write. You have the details in your head, but you’re not staring at them while you work, meaning you’re not tempted to copy-paste them right into your document.

Okay … I hear you complaining right about now.

“But Cameron, that’s so much extra work! Why not have only the short outline in the first place?”

Sure, it is a bit extra work: removing lines from the long outline, deciding what is so essential that you need to have it available to you, and checking back in with the long outline if you really have to.

However, this way fights the pesky mental rehearsing while still allowing you to plan ahead.

Double Outlines Give You the Best of Both Worlds

You get to meticulously plan without overwhelming yourself. You have some of the freedom that pantsers enjoy, but you also get the comfort of outlining – without sacrificing motivation.

A lot of times, I do the long outline and then never look at it again; I’ve memorized most of what I want to do and can follow the short outline. However, because I don’t have my full plans right there to review, I don’t feel like I’ve already done the work: I know I need to actually write the real thing.

This method works well for those who get anxious about the idea of pantsing but struggle to retain their motivation once they’ve completed their outline. It’s also great for those who have spent a lot of time analyzing and daydreaming about their work, to the point where they don’t even feel they need to write it.

If you often find yourself paralyzed after planning, consider double outlining.

Double outlines are simple and effective. Though they may seem like they take much more work than just a short outline, it’s actually not that hard to distill your plans into a brief. In fact, many use a similar method for developing their synopsis before they start to write, allowing them the freedom to cut everything down before they try to query.

Of course, no tool works for everyone. If you try this and don’t like it, you have my blessing to never do it again. Everyone is different, which is why writing is such a wonderful craft!

Knowing that there are other strategies can be incredibly helpful if you’re new to writing and have no idea where to start. I’m always happy to share, and I hope you get some benefit from dipping your toe into double outlining.