These are the notes for a podcast I’m preparing about writing called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group. When it’s ready, it will be available through here and mindofbryan.com.

The question comes out about outlining a lot from beginning writers, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes not all that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.

We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrum between these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and some are completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just an individual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind when writing commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writing process. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do some early exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outline and writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are two words for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.

My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writing and you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject to start with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not just the skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my own life was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writing television scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75 pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, and he wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outline and scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle, but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His next episode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. He wasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’t organize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story, and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that he wasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue, but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I know at the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, which for me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writer talking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s ever had to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learned here. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had it written out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writers are generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, an accepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makes you a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being a good writer.

Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all get worked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happens without paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I wait until a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as I have, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so the process is much more on paper.

With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning and usually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. In fact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. My outlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptions may be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will be finished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages, my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning that to a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty five comic pages. It blew him away.

I really consider this my first draft. My friends who are writers can’t even make heads or tails out of it, but it all makes sense to me. When I write my first attempt at a finished product, I don’t look at this as a rigid outline at all. Sometimes scenes merge, sometimes they drop out, sometimes they move. I keep a mind on it being an organic story with real characters who don’t necessarily act as they were expected in the outline phase. This is a fear of organic writers, that the outline will force them into a plot that is not natural. If we remember that the outline is mutable, we lose that worry. We can keep asking ourselves “what would this character do next?” but it might be rephrased, “is this really what this character does next?”

I often hear the questions, “I have a middle and no beginning or end, what do I do?” or “I have a world and a few scenes and characters, but I don’t know what to do with them.” My suggestion is to arrange what you have, either in a file or if you prefer to work more concretely, on note cards, and try to write the scene in either direction. As that question, where does this go? How do these link up? What does this character do next? What led to this scene? When we come up with ideas for books, the first plot points we come up with are the big ones. I’m going to use Star Wars as an example, since it is one of the most universal cultural events that is worth analyzing. I’m going to put money on the notion that Lucas didn’t get a great idea about picking two robots out of a line-up, in particular one that can speak to moisture vaporators, and the rest of the story came from that point. It is a mundane scene that serves only to get the droids to Luke. I’m guessing Lucas started with points like the Death Star blowing up and rescue of Leia, and then filled in between.

Now, it seems to me that most beginning writers don’t think about structure, and this is because they don’t teach structure in a lot of classes. We all remember, probably, the rising structure of the story. We start with an inciting incident, build it slowly, but with certain acceleration to a climax, and then have a slight denouement. It looks something like one delta wave cycle, or maybe a saw wave. I think this is one structure, and the most basic. It works for short pieces, and in larger pieces, on a whole. If we look at a famous story, the first Star Wars movie, we start with the inciting incident—Leia’s ship being boarded. Then we drop to this small unwitting desert planet, and rise to the inevitable big battle that blows up the Death Star. There are other climax points, though. We rise in tension until Dantooine is blown up. Then we hit the first climax, the fight in the prison block. The escape is another little climax, and then we get to the big battle.

I think there are other structures. My next book is based on a spiral, or more to the point, a fractal, and The Hidden is also. The first sequences in these books are a microscale version of the rest of the book. In the Hidden Malcolm wakes up, finds he is being attacked by a demon. He discovers what is happening, has a brief confrontation and then  dispatches the offender. Then the story moves on, and the pattern repeats a couple times on an ever grander scale. In Inside, my next book, Michael has an art showing, his sister comes in with trouble, his parents come to visit, the protest happens outside, the showing is infiltrated and attacked, with some innocent people caught in the crossfire, and we are all left standing wondering why this has to happen. This expands into a plot where similar events happen as the conflict grows and the stakes get higher until the final climax of the book.

In part two of this article, I’ll cover several other structures in writing from various mediums that can be applied to any type of narrative writing.