I’ve always been one of those non-outline writers. I’ve heard several different names for it. Organic writer. “Fly by the seat of your pants” writer. Whatever you call it, I’ve always been the kind of writer that just sits down with a basic idea, starts typing, and finds the story somewhere along the way.
Sure, it meant that my first drafts were huge messes. Most of the time I didn’t know where the story was going when I started. Sometimes I only knew my main character. The other characters and the plot would develop along the way. It meant that I’d have dialogue that served no purpose scattered through the pages but had been typed during a time when I didn’t know where to head next and needed some mindless typing to get myself going again. Despite all of that I still managed to find my way to the end and in my revisions I’d end up with a story and secondary plotlines that made sense. It meant that my first drafts were filled with a LOT of red ink as I marked in corrections and changes.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to outline. Every book on writing I’ve read has instructed me to outline. I’ve tried many different ways to do this, from a few lines written on index cards to following a printed list of questions from a writing book. Nothing helped. I’d get stuck somewhere along the way and couldn’t find my way through without writing.
Last week I found the Snowflake Method for Writing a Novel. Basically, you start with one sentence. Then you turn that sentence into a paragraph. Then turn that paragraph into a page. And that page into an outline, telling all the scenes needed for your novel from start to finish.
I opened up the composition book where I had been keeping snippets of ideas and character sketches for Girlfriend (working title) and wrote at the top of the page: Outline. Then I started writing my one sentence and next my one paragraph.
After twelve handwritten pages, I had my first full outline of a novel. I still keep looking through those pages amazed that I actually have an outline for my book. I have never been able to outline from start to finish before this! This is a more amazing feat for me than actually writing a novel. I already knew I could do that, but I didn’t know until now that I could outline!
And this thing is a genius. Now I understand why all the writing books say to outline, they just didn’t ever teach me a method that worked for me. Today I wrote two and a half chapters all because I knew exactly what needed to happen and how the characters needed to react. I knew what things I needed to set up in these chapters that would affect the ending of the book.
I can outline now! I can do anything! Like resist eating that entire bag of gummy worms I have in the kitchen!
Okay, maybe not that. But I CAN outline.