The Write Way | ✔︎

05 | OUTLINES

     This is by far my most favorite part of the writing process. I say this because while it's fun to tell stories, writing itself can be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes, and who wants that? I'd rather have a pain-free ass, thanks.

     Now, I'm sure if you've tried writing anything before—be it essays or short stories or novels—you've heard of outlines. An outline can be anything from a simple one-line description of what you want to happen, to something as complex as an extensive description of what's going to happen and why. I like to take that a step further and go crazy with my outline.

     Earlier this year, I was going through a bit of a writer's block. I hadn't written anything outside of class requirements and I was beginning to worry that I'd lost the skill to write completely. I wondered if I was ever a writer at all, or if truth was catching up to me and finally exposing me as the fraud I had been all along.

     But I couldn't imagine not writing. I couldn't imagine a world where I wasn't dreaming up stories and sharing it with people, so as a last ditch effort, I tried writing a different way altogether. I wrote a screenplay.

     My reason for it was that I'd been binging TV shows and movies on Netflix and was fascinated by how they were able to tell stories without relying on descriptions that I'm so often bogged down by. I liked the challenge of thinking visually to reveal things about my characters, of showing them crying than just saying they were sad, and so I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, not caring for how the work would read because nobody beyond my imagined cast and crew would ever read it. It was a work made to be adapted, so I got to focus on telling a good story than writing one. Those are two different things altogether, because you can tell a story many ways: orally, visually. Writing is just one way.

     After I finished the script, I felt accomplished. I wrote a hundred pages in about five days! I could still write! It was all the validation I needed to keep on trucking.

     After some time, I got the idea of adapting that script into a novel. In Elizabeth Gilbert's book, "Big Magic", she wrote about channeling your trickster spirit when it came to writing. Why? Because writing is hard. The words don't come out right sometimes, if they even bother to come out at all. Muse is a fickle thing, but that doesn't make us bad writers. It just becomes our responsibility to coax the story out gently, in whatever way we can. Writing scripts was my way—and I've been sharing it with anyone who'll listen.

     I realized that in the process of trying something new, I figured out a way to make writing work for me. Because the script had the story down, I wouldn't have to worry about what happens next when I sit down and try to focus on writing the story. I can focus more on the narrative and the emotions otherwise unmentioned in the script, and when I put them together, I get a whole novel.

     All that is to say this: outlines are important. If I didn't have the script to keep me on track, chances are, I'd have abandoned the piece altogether. I've done it before; I've done it so many times that I refuse to ever look back now that I won't have to.

     The outline doesn't have to be perfect. Nobody but you will ever read it, so word-vomit all over that document all you want. There is freedom in knowing it'll suck but also that it's supposed to. It just gives you more reason to write a better first draft.

     However, if you're the kind of person who likes to just dive in and see where the story takes them, that's fine too. Personally I just found that I had more of a tendency to second-guess my work and abandon it altogether without the crutch of an outline. If that sounds like you, then give outlines a try. I promise you won't regret it.