Today I spent most of the afternoon cleaning dirty turtle tanks. The filters were clogged, the rocks had accumulated filth, and the floating turtle docks were beginning to grow algae. It's not my favorite thing in the world to do, but in order to have healthy turtles, they have to have clean houses. It's just something that needs to be done.
Outlining is like that. For the first twenty years of my writing life, I wrote without an outline. When I felt inspired, I wrote until I got tired. Then the next day, I wrote some more. Things were often out of order. At the end of a piece of writing, I spent a lot of time piecing together my writing in order. In effect, I was working backwards. What always ended up happening was that I'd have a scene/chapter or two that didn't fit anywhere that ended up being omitted entirely that I had spent a lot of time on.
Then I went to graduate school. Before writing my thesis paper, I had to take this hellish class called History of Literary Research. Yes, it was as boring as it sounds. The idea behind this class was to look up every single piece of literary research written in English on your proposed thesis topic and write a research paper on it. My thesis was supposed to be on John Donne's Anniversary Poems, so I had to go back through 400 years of literary research in sixteen weeks.
Writing that paper forced me to outline. I had a 45 page paper with a 13 page bibliography. The most boring stuff ever written. If I didn't outline, I never would have gotten the paper done in sixteen weeks.
Oh, and then four days before the due date, my computer crashed from a virus, which had infected both my disc and backup discs. I lost everything except my original draft dot matrix printout. I begged my professor to give me an extension and wonderful woman she was, she said, "The paper's due on Friday." So, three all nighters and I pulled it off. I nearly had a nervous breakdown.
What I did walk away with from that class was two things: 1. my teacher was a witch and 2. outlining made life easier. And, I'm proud to say, I came to the outlining part on my own.
Ever since then, I force myself to outline, even when I'm dying to write. I remember Robert McKee saying in his Story seminar that once you finish outlining and writing your synopsis, your screenplay will be jumping out of you.
Please check out my novel Luke Aloysius: Bloodline on Amazon:
Peace!
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