This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 95: Sarah Tries Outlining.

 

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner.

 

And those of you who have been listening to this podcast for a long time now, know that I am a pantser, and not a plotter. I have no idea where these terms originated, but you may have heard before the adage that you’re either a plotter or a pantser. So either you plot out what you’re going to write, or you write by the seat of your pants and are therefore a pantser.

 

I have been a pantser my entire life. I think this comes from a little bit of a resentment that I picked up in middle school and high school toward writing outlines. So an outline is basically a plan for what you’re going to write and the outlines that I was taught to write in middle school, and then high school consisted of an introduction, and then whatever ideas you needed to convey in that introduction. Three supporting paragraphs that argued for or against, or in some way supported your argument that you had stated in your introduction, and then each of those had little points to them. And then a conclusion, where you restated your hypothesis or your thesis statement and summed up what you had said.

 

I was always very impatient and I didn’t like writing essays, which is hilarious because decades later I was essentially doing this full-time in content marketing, but I didn’t want to do the outline. I didn’t want to spend time writing the outline. I just wanted to get the essay over with, and I didn’t want to create an outline, and then essentially recreate that outline in prose form when I wrote the essay. It was boring, and it was redundant, and it felt like a waste of my time.

 

Later, when I took some creative writing classes and realized that we had to turn in outlines for the projects we were working on, I was horrified. One of the things I loved most about writing, about the craft of writing, and the experience of writing was the ability to make discoveries along the way and to surprise myself. If you go all the way back into the Write Now podcast archives, episode four is all about surprising yourself while creating. I love that! I live for that. That’s my favorite thing about writing and creating. And in my eyes, coming up with an outline for a creative project effectively ruined that surprise and robbed me of the sense of discovery along the way. I even remember arguing with an English teacher and saying, “It’s okay. I don’t really need to write an outline. I know what I’m doing.” Because ego, apparently, at the age of 14 or 15 or whatever, I had nothing left to learn.

 

And I’m embarrassed to say, that mindset stuck with me for years and even decades. Writing an outline for a story sucked all of the joy out of the discovery of writing that story. And I thought to myself, what fun is a spontaneous and whimsical road trip if you have to follow a map if you know where it’s going to end. Now later, I realized I had tied up a whole bunch of my own personal baggage into the whole plotting versus pantsing thing. And that partially, my need to write freely and exploratorily, I don’t know if that’s a word, but my need to do that, my need to pants my way through a project came from my own inability to focus and to follow directions and to pay attention. I have enormous trouble, even today as an adult, focusing and maintaining my focus, and pantsing was a way that I could create while maintaining my sense of focus.

 

But then as I started creating, and here’s the kicker, attempting to finish more and more projects and larger and larger projects, I began to run into problems. I had difficulty keeping an entire plot in my head. I had difficulty tying up all the little plot threads that had been left dangling. I had trouble where I would write something and I would happily write and write and write. And 30 or 40 or 50 pages later, I would realize I had gone down a path that did not work, whether plot-wise, character-wise, whatever reason. I had written myself into a corner, I had written myself down a path that just wasn’t right for the story. So I would backtrack until I found the point where things had gone wrong and I would take those 30 or 40 pages and cut them out of my manuscript and dump them into a file that I called leftovers. And I found that the further along I got in a project, the larger and larger and larger my leftovers file was growing.

 

I was taking so many wrong turns and I was putting so much effort and writing so much dialogue and moving characters forward. And essentially my drafts were turning into these Medusas, into these trailheads that went off in 15, 16 directions, and each direction had the baggage of 20 to 40 pages of backtracked material. And it was becoming difficult for me to remember what was actually part of the story and what I had discovered, and then backtracked and had to relegate it over to my leftovers file. I realized I was spending so much time and so much energy and so much effort writing page after page, that would end up essentially in the garbage. I was at a standstill.

 

This happened most recently as I was writing season two of Girl In Space. Even season one of Girl In Space, that finale, I rewrote that hour-long finale, I think eight or nine times, maybe more. And I was on episode three of season two of Girl In Space, and I was on my fourth rewrite, complete rewrite. And my leftovers file had three or four different versions of episode three, and it was about to gain another one. And I remember looking at my computer screen and feeling frustrated and angry. How many times, I asked myself, am I going to have to write this before I finally, and perhaps randomly end up wandering in the correct direction?

 

Now at this point, you may be feeling a similar frustration, or you may be feeling frustrated toward me and saying, “Sarah, oh my gosh, just make an outline already.” But I was being resistant. I had all that baggage about outlining and how it sucked the joy out of creative work. I had so many memories of anger and frustration tied up in outlining, in planning.

 

And again, I don’t know if this is just me. I don’t know if anyone is going to be able to relate to this episode or not. I never know, going into recording a podcast episode, whether or not people will resonate and identify with what I’m talking about. And I think that’s a little bit of a risk that I take as a podcaster, is if I just jump in and I tell my story and I hope, I hope that it helps. I hope that at least one person is able to relate to what I’m saying and to benefit from it. I get a lot of reviews for this show that say, “Oh, all Sarah does is whine about herself, and it’s all me, me, me.” And I don’t know, I’m really sensitive to that because I want this podcast to be a rich and giving and beneficial experience for every single listener.

 

It is definitely not my intention to come in here and be like me, me, me, me, me, it’s all about me. But I also want to be honest about my experience and my story, because I’ve learned a lot about writing. And I think it’s important for me to share that with you. Along the way, I’ve discovered truths, and I’ve had to change my mind and my mindset and maybe I’m a huge narcissist, but maybe it’s also helpful.

 

I remember at the time of my deep, deep frustration with my rewrite and rewrite and rewrite of season two episode three of Girl In Space, I was texting my good friend Jordan, and she had mentioned something about outlining. She was working on a new project and she was working through just a very rough, 30,000-foot overview type of outline for this project. And I said, “Jordan, doesn’t that drive you crazy? Doesn’t that just suck the joy out of the entire project?” And this is not a direct quote. This is just the sense of what she said. So Jordan, if you’re listening, I am not quoting you directly. But Jordan said something to the effect of, “No, my outlines are vague enough so that I have a rough idea of where I’m going without spoiling the whole experience for myself.”

 

And I remember that she spoke of an outline as being a tool that was freeing instead of suffocating. And that got me interested. And Jordan offered to share her outline with me. And it was essentially just, episode one, this happens and this happens. Episode two, this happens, and then this. Episode three, this happens and leaves people on a cliffhanger. And it was just a very, 30,000-foot overview. It was not a Roman numeral, point by point, plot detail by plot detail up until the end. It was just a vague idea, a rough sketch of what to expect and what to create along the way.

 

I want to be able to tell you that after this text conversation, I immediately changed my ways and decided to try outlining, but I had all of those years of baggage and I had all of those years of resistance still built up. But the seed had been planted and the word outline was bouncing around in my brain, like the screensaver on a DVD player, where the little DVD logo changes colors and bounces around the edges of the screen, and every once in a while, lodges itself into the corner perfectly. It’s a little bit of a tangent, but that’s how that idea felt. And I remembered, hey, wait a minute. Did I buy a book on outlining five years ago?

 

So I have this problem. Well, I have a lot of problems, but I have this one problem where I buy books and I buy way too many books. And lately, I’ve been buying digital books, so eBooks. And I have, I don’t know if I’m proud of this or ashamed of this or something in the middle, but I am proud/ashamed to say that I have something like a thousand books downloaded onto my phone. And I was scrolling through my books and there it was, the book that I very vaguely and hazily remember purchasing years ago, an eBook called Outlining your Novel by K M Weiland, and it might be pronounced Wayland, I’m not sure.

 

But I remember K M Weiland was this blogger who I had been following, and she writes very succinct and helpful things about writing. And you can find her work over at helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com. She writes about plot hooks and developing plot hooks and character arcs and all sorts of wonderful technical things such as outlining your novel. And the book starts out by saying, “Hey, there’s a spectrum of writers and they’re plotters and pantsers,” or I think the book uses outliners and non-outliners. But the first sentence that really spoke out to me says, “The individual writer is the only expert of his own proficiency. Never feel as if you have to force your writing habits to mirror someone else’s, no matter how successful that person may be in his own right.”

 

I read that in a book that I thought was going to try to convince me that outlining was the way to go. And I was like, oh, maybe there’s some flexibility here. And that kept me going. That kept me reading. That simple acknowledgment that maybe there’s not just one correct way to write. Later in that same first chapter, it says, “Some people just don’t work well with outlines. They find outlines cramp their creativity by preventing the story from evolving as they write, or they discover writing an outline scratches the creative itch, to the extent they no longer have any interest in writing the book itself.” And I was like, whoa, she understands. And I kept reading.

 

And she went on to talk about her experience pantsing a novel versus her experience plotting it. And again, I felt so much of that story resonating with me. She talked about being tired of rewriting and ditching great material. And I was like, oh my gosh, I feel this so deeply in my soul. One of the next things that she says in the book aligned with what Jordan had told me, and that is, outlines take many forms. Some of them little more than a few sentences scrawled on a post-it note, some of them notebooks full of ramblings. No one says your outline has to be of any particular length.

 

“Most of my outlines,” and again, this is the author speaking, “Fill up at least a notebook or two. A bulleted list of scenes may be all you need, or you may end up with five notebooks of scribblings. What’s important is recognizing the outline as a valuable tool and then figuring out how to make it work for you.” Realizing that an outline could be whatever the heck I wanted it to be, that I didn’t have to use Roman numerals, that I didn’t have to essentially beat a dead horse of ideas in the middle of a road somewhere, that was the green light for me. Realizing that I could be just as creative in my outline as I was in my writing, that was the tipping point for me.

 

And so I tried outlining, and here’s what I learned. Here’s what I discovered. That outlining does not box in, or destroy, or limit creativity. An outline is the beginning of creativity. And for me, it was a place where since I hand wrote mine, I could be messy and sloppy and cross stuff out without writing the polished dialogue and prose that I had been. So I no longer was writing things and backtracking and relegating those segments to my leftovers file.

 

I also realized that in a way, I had already been structuring my work without consciously realizing it. I went back and re-listened to season one of Girl In Space. And I was like, oh, it ended up with a structure. Here’s the character introduction. Here’s the hook. Here’s the rising action. Here’s the climax. Here’s the falling action. Here’s character arc one. Here’s character arc two. Something about realizing that I already sort of knew what to do and this time I would just get the opportunity to make it more explicit was a relief to me. In a way, I almost now had permission to try outlining.

 

So here’s what I did. I didn’t just sit down and write Roman numeral one, X wakes up from being unconscious and discovers/realizes… point one, point two, point three. I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to do that because doing that felt gross. Instead, I opened up a new spiral notebook, and honestly, I journaled along with K M Weiland’s book. I love journaling. I journal every day and journaling felt safe. It felt like a good place for me to begin. And so I journaled along with the book and within the book are several exercises that you can do that will ease you into outlining.

 

And I’m going to tell you about two of my favorites, two of the most, what I felt were the most worthwhile exercises and the most helpful for me during this process. So I didn’t just start with Roman numeral one, X wakes up from being unconscious and realizes… point A, point B, point C. Instead, I started with an idea generation exercise called the “what if” list. And this is an exercise from the book Outlining Your Novel by K M Weiland. But basically, you write what if… at the top of a page, and then you spend some time writing an infinite list of what ifs.

 

So for season two of Girl In Space, I wrote a lot of what ifs and you just allow yourself to be messy. You allow yourself to write whatever comes to mind and you do it without judgment. So what if this has all been a dream, which it’s not, and that’s a cliche that I don’t particularly care for, but what if X discovers this? What if this happens? What if the bad guys weren’t the bad guys? What if the good guys weren’t the good guys? What if this person has been killed? What if this person is secretly in love with this person? What if, what if, what if, and it just brought me so much joy and delight and the opposite of the stifling that I thought this process would bring. I found joy and discovery and asked myself this series of what ifs.

 

The second exercise I really enjoyed was the, “what is expected” exercise. Again, one of my favorite things about writing is surprising myself and creating surprises. And so understanding what is expected and what is unexpected of the story. So what are my listeners and my readers going to expect? Well, they’re going to expect that this happens and this happens. Okay, but what if I subvert that? Writing a list of everything I thought my listeners and readers would expect was also incredibly eye opening and full of joy and discovery.

 

These two exercises took up the first, I think, 10 or 12 pages of my notebook. And it was so affirming to see that a structured writing process could generate creativity and generate even more ideas than I thought I was capable of generating. The book walks you through exercise after exercise, and really where I think it excels is asking questions that I didn’t know to ask. From listing scenes that you wanted to see, and then connecting the dots between them, to understanding the motives and desires and goals of not just your main character, but of all of the characters in your work, and sketching those out too.

 

So really at the end of all of this, what I ended up with was a notebook full of rich ideas and possibilities. A piece of assurance that I wouldn’t run out of ideas, that I wouldn’t be going down roads that no longer panned out, that I wouldn’t have to do the pages and pages and pages of unnecessary rewrites. I also didn’t have a very structured Roman numerals traditional outline that I had so many negative feelings about.

 

So what I did was I went through my notebook and I put a little star next to all of my favorite and most fun ideas and the scenes that I thought would be the most fun to write and see come to life. And I got some very inexpensive note cards, little index cards. And because I’m that person, I cut them all in half, but you don’t have to do that. And you don’t have to follow any of this. That’s the beauty of this, is discovering your own creativity recipe. But I went through my notebook, and at this point I had written 75 pages in my notebook, 75 handwritten pages of thoughts and ideas and motives and goals and fun twists and turns.

 

And I wrote down all of these fun ideas that I had starred, each one as a plot point on an index card or in my case, a half of an index card, because it felt really wasteful to use a full index card. But again, that’s me and I’m weird. And as I wrote each plot point, I began to put these into a stack and I said, “Oh, this can happen before this. Okay. And then I can put this card here. Oh, and that’ll be the end of episode four. Oh, Oh, Oh. And then this can happen here. Oh, and I’ll put this plot point here and here.”

 

And all of a sudden I had a stack of over 200 plot points and I said, “Oh, well, I guess this is my outline for season two.” And for me, it’s perfect because I continue to slide new cards into them. I continue to take out cards and crumple them up. I continue to reorganize and rearrange my cards, but it feels like freedom. It’s not rigid, it’s fluid. And as I’m writing, I can look at the next card on top of the pile and say, “Oh, okay, I’ve hit that plot point.” And I’ll essentially turn the page and I’ll uncover the next index card. “Okay, now I know what to write toward.” And I am free to write toward that. I’m free to deviate from it. It’s just so reassuring to know that I’m no longer fumbling through the dark.

 

If this sounds appealing to you, I definitely recommend it. This is just one method that worked for me. I definitely, definitely recommend, whether or not you’re open to the idea of outlining or not, just take a look at K M Weiland’s book, Outlining Your Novel. It’s full of just really rich and interesting writing exercises that I found really helpful in the development of my story.

 

And again, I want to just really hammer home the point that there’s no right way to create. There’s no one method that will work for everyone. Maybe you use a Roman numeral outline and maybe you love it, and that’s awesome because it works for you. I am so happy that I have found a method that works for me. I never thought this would be possible. I never thought I would be anything other than someone who just wrote from the seat of their pants. And in a way I still am, and that’s really what’s beautiful about it because I can still be myself. I can still make decisions on the fly and decide to surprise myself and surprise my listener or my reader. But at the same time, if I need it, if I get it stuck, I have a guide.

 

I will be linking to K M Weiland’s book, Outlining Your Novel, in the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 95. You can find the show notes for today’s episode out at sarahwerner.com. And you can find KM Weiland’s website out at helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com. And I will have a link to that in the show notes for today’s episode as well.

 

This episode is made possible by my amazing and beautiful supporters out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that lets people give a dollar per episode, $2 per episode, a billion dollars per episode, whatever it is that you are feeling the show is worth to you. You can find it out at patreon.com. That’s patreon.com/SarahRheaWerner. Or you can navigate to the show notes for this episode out at sarahwerner.com, and click the link that says help support this podcast. Special thanks go out today to Amanda King, Amanda L. Dickson, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Michael Beckwith, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, TJ Bricke, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Ricardo Lugo, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you all so much for your generosity, it means the world to me.

 

And with that, this has been episode 95 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy and courage, you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I am so happy that I tried outlining.

[Closing music.]