I Don't Really Have to Use Roman Numerals, Do I?10 March 2003 Outlining. For many writers, it's a four-letter word. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, it helps to know where you're going. First off, there's lots of different ways to approach outlining, of which the formal, academic Roman numeral method is only one -- and not a very good choice for fiction. Regardless what you were taught in school, there is no one "right" way to outline. The idea is to find the method -- or methods -- that work for you and use it well. If there's no one correct way to outline, why are we doing it? Shouldn't we be spending our time writing, instead? Unless you're freewriting -- stream of consciousness stuff that's great practice but almost never publishable -- you need a map. Those who say writing's about the journey rather than the destination have never felt the vein-popping, book-flinging fury of reading a book that just petered out in the last 50 pages rather that building to a satisfying climax. Don't inflict this kind of self-indulgent tripe on your readers. A good story knows where it's going. There should be -- better damn well be -- distractions and red herrings along the way, but when the reader gets to "The End," they should be confident that what they just read is the only way the book could have turned out. To get that kind of certainty, you as the author have to know where you're going. The above obviously concerns fiction. If I really have to explain why nonfiction, especially book-length nonfiction, requires a detailed outline of a logical structure... Don't make me have you stay after school. The simplest kind of outline is the prose summary. This can range from a short, three paragraph -- beginning, middle, end and yes, Aristotle's still with us -- synopsis of the story to many pages of detailed scenes. Some writers go into so much depth with the prose summary that it borders on a draft, needing only dialogue and description to flesh it out. When I do these, I stick to the three paragraph approach, though they're often long paragraphs. The trick to this kind of outline is to give yourself a "cheat sheet" on where the story's going without going into so much detail that it takes all the fun out of actually writing the story. The next form of outline, and my personal favorite, is the bulleted list. I use this for both columns and fiction, breaking each article or chapter into bullet points describing topics or scenes I need to visit. This is a very linear way of working that doesn't do very well for longish nonfiction (see the next two outline types), but it works great for fiction and short informal articles. I like it because it provides just enough structure while leaving me ample room to play and explore as I write. Between Heaven and Hell was written as three parts each consisting of twenty chapters each consisting of four scenes. I needed that kind of structure to my first novel, though I loosened up considerably for Do Over! and the novel I'm working on now. If you really want structure, the next step up from the bulleted list is the hierarchical outline, the kind of outline you learned in school, but without the goofy Roman numerals. I only use this one for book-length nonfiction, although some people do write fiction this way. For nonfiction, this is essential, since most nonfiction books need to be laid out in a logical fashion to be understandable. And unlike the previous two methods, which can be written with any text processor, or even on paper (I generally even omit the bullets from my bulleted lists, writing to just phrases separated by returns), hierarchical outlines work much better on a computer. Using Streamliner on my Pocket PC or ShadowPlan on my Clié, I can freely promote or demote nodes on my outline, moving sections around willy nilly until the sequence is perfect. Then the completed outline can be exported to RTF or PalmDoc, respectively, to be opened in a text processor and fleshed out. And if PDAs help with hierarchical outlines, they're almost essential for the next type of outline: Mindmapping. For those of you not familiar with the concept, mindmapping is similar to outlining, but free-form and 3-D. You start with a central idea and then write everything you can think of associated with it around it. Then you repeat the process for each secondary idea. Mindmapping lacks the rigid structure of hierarchical outlining, but it's more flexible and can produce some surprisingly insightful relationships between ideas. Mindmapping can be done on big sheets of paper -- or whiteboards -- but it works really well on a computer. Pocket Mindmap on the Pocket PC does a great job of handling the "what goes where" aspect of mindmapping while letting you focus on getting the ideas out of your head and into a manageable form. It also goes the extra mile and lets you view the mindmap as a hierarchical outline for more detailed organization. When it's all done you can export as HTML for work with other applications. Neat! If you're the kind of writer who loves to write by the seat of your pants and can't imagine actually outlining anything, give mindmapping a try. You might be pleasantly surprised with the results. Lastly, and this gets back to the spontaneous writing by the seat of your pants thing, you could work without a net and just write the first draft as it comes to you. I know this seems like counterintuitive advice in an article about outlining, but some writers use the first draft as kind of a giant, incredibly detailed prose summary. One of the guys in my writer's group noticed that the ending of a novella he's working on seemed to come out of nowhere. But now that he knows that's how the story is going to end -- he's the kind of guy that starts twitching whenever I bring up the concept of writing to a premise, much less an outline -- he can go back and add sufficient foreshadowing in the second draft to make the ending fit with the rest of the story. I'm not saying this is the best way to write, but it can work. Writing is a journey, and it is as much about the journey as the destination. But that doens't mean wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. No matter how much fun the detours are, you need a map to keep you on track. Get used to outlining, and your journeys will go a lot smoother. Jeff Kirvin
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