Tony Hillerman takes the same position, not because it’s more fun necessarily but because it’s what comes naturally for him:
I have never been able to outline a book. I work from a basic general idea, a couple of clearly understood characters, a couple of thematic and plot ideas, and a rough conception of where I’m going with it all. I also work with a clear idea of place. I tend to write in scenes — getting one vividly in mind, then putting it quickly on paper.
In marked contrast, consider this from Richard S. Prather, author of forty suspense novels, most of them lighthearted frothy chronicles of the doings of private eye Shell Scott:
I spend considerable time on plot development, typing roughly 100,000 or more words of scene fragments, gimmicks, “what if?” possibilities, alternative actions or solutions, until the overall story line satisfies me. I boil all of this down to a couple of pages, then from these prepare a detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis, using a separate page (or more) for each of, say, twenty chapters, and expanding in those pages upon characters, motivations, scenes, action, whenever such expansion seems a natural development. When the synopsis is done, I start the first draft of the book and bang away as speedily as possible until the end.
If I ever tried the method Prather describes, I’m sure what I produced would have all the freshness and appeal of week-old mashed potatoes; it would certainly not possess the sparkle of his Shell Scott books — which only serves to underscore the highly individual nature of outlines in particular and writing methods in general. If writing with an outline is for some people like filling in a printed form, writing without an outline is for others like playing tennis without a net — as Robert Frost said of free verse. In some instances, it’s even more like walking a tightrope without a net.
It’s all up to you. If you feel comfortable beginning your book without an outline — or even without all that firm an idea where it’s going — by all means go ahead. If you’ll feel more confident of your ability to finish the book with an outline in front of you, by all means construct and employ one. As you go along, you’ll learn what works best for the particular writer you turn out to be.
And that’s all that matters. No one ever bought a book because it was written with an outline, or because it wasn’t.
I want to use an outline. Now what?
The first step is to find out what an outline is. And the easiest way to do that is to write one. Not of your book but of somebody else’s.
In an earlier chapter, we discussed this method of preparing an outline of someone else’s book as a means of understanding how novels work. The process is similarly valuable as an aid to learning what an outline is.
Some years back I decided in a weak moment that I wanted to write movies. I was bright enough to recognize that film is an infinitely different medium from prose, and reasoned that I had to familiarize myself with it before I could expect to produce anything that would fly. First thing I did was start going to movies day after day.
This was fun, and it wasn’t all that bad an idea, but it didn’t teach me a hell of a lot about screenwriting. I came to realize somewhere along the way that I was taking the wrong approach. I wouldn’t be writing movies, after all. I would be writing screenplays. So, instead of studying the films themselves, I ought to be reading their scripts.
If it sounds like a small distinction, I suggest you give it some thought. What I wanted to write was a script, and in order to do that I had to learn what a script was, how it worked not on the screen but on the page. I had to be able to see a film as words on paper, not images on a screen, because I would be writing that script by putting words on paper.
So I read scripts, quite a few of them, and what a difference it made! In the first place, I began to understand what scripts were, how they were written, and how I could write one of my own. In the second place and at least as important, my reading of film scripts made a significant change in my perception when I looked at a film in a theater. My perspective was changed, and I’d look at the movie and mentally translate it back into the script it had come from.
This didn’t make me a screenwriter. I did write a movie script, and a treatment for another movie, and in the course of doing this I learned that I wasn’t really cut out to be a screenwriter and didn’t really want to be one, for any of a variety of perfectly sound reasons. But I still watch films with a heightened awareness of the underlying screenplay, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this has paid some dividends in my prose writing.
In the same fashion, the best preparation for writing an outline is reading outlines, not reading novels. By studying the outlines themselves you will see how an outline looks on a typed page; as important, you will develop the ability to see other novels — and, ultimately, your own novel — with x-ray eyes; i.e., you’ll see through the prose and dialogue to the bare bones beneath.
How do you outline another person’s novel? Whatever way you wish. Your outline of somebody else’s book can be as sketchy or as detailed as you like, just as the outline you eventually work up for your own novel may be sketchy or detailed, brief or lengthy. Do whatever seems most natural to you.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with outlines of other writers’ novels — or once you’ve decided not to bother with that step — it’s time to get to work on your own outline. At this point some warm-up exercises and wind sprints can be useful. Few of us would care to do as much pre-outline work as Richard S. Prather describes, with preparatory writing running to almost double the length of the finished book, but one can do as much as seems useful.
Character sketches are handy, for example. In the preceding chapter I mentioned how the evolution of my Matthew Scudder character was facilitated by the memo I wrote to myself, in which I discussed Scudder at some length, talking about his background, his habits, his current way of life, his likes and dislikes, and how he likes his eggs for breakfast. In his journals, Chekhov suggests that a writer ought to know everything he can about a character — his shoe size, the condition of his liver, lungs, clothes, habits, and intestinal track. You may not mention the greater portion of this in your writing, but the better you know your characters the more effectively you’ll be able to write about them. I always keep learning new things about my characters as I go along; I’m still learning about Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, even after several books about each of them — but the better I know them in advance, the better equipped I am for outlining and, later, for writing the novel.
It’s also occasionally helpful to write an answer to the question “What is this book about?” In the early days of Hollywood, the conventional wisdom held that a story line ought to be capable of being conveyed in a single sentence. While I suspect this theory was originally propounded by illiterates who couldn’t hold more than one sentence in their heads at a time, and while it unquestionably overstates the case, there’s some merit to the argument. If nothing else, one feels more confident about approaching a book when one is able to say, if only to oneself, what the thing is about.
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers is about a cheeky professional burglar who steals an object to order, and the cops walk in on him and catch him in the act, and there’s a dead body in the apartment and he escapes and has to clear himself by solving the crime, which he does.