To outline or not to outline? My god, that is the question. I wonder sometimes if Shakespeare outlined. Maybe somewhere, lost in the annals of time, there’s a crumpled up parchment with “Scene One: Hamlet marries Ophelia. Scene Two: The King is jailed for murder. Scene Three: ?” scrawled on it. If he did outline his famous plays, my admiration for The Bard just kicked up another notch. As much as I’m obsessed with outlining, I can’t actually do it.

Or, as I tell myself every time I get stuck in a manuscript and troll the web for new outlining techniques, I just can’t do it YET.

I’ve researched many, many ways to map out a story before I write it. Some of my favorites are The Snowflake Method, the Save the Cat! Beat Sheet, and Helene Boudreau’s Plotting…OCD Style . I even took the best of these and made my own spreadsheet, which I call my Novel Roadmap. I had enormous fun making it.

I have yet to complete a novel using it.

I used to think the problem is that I can’t write something I’ve already put out there. It’s the same reason I don’t tell anybody my story ideas until I’m finished writing them: if I tell the story, I’m done with it and it will never be written. So maybe I can’t complete an outlined story because I’ve already told it to the universe in the form of the outline and now, my mind is already moving on.

Actually, reading that back, the above paragraph seems incredibly grandiose. Not that I want to start blabbing them to everybody before hand, but are my ideas really so precious and fragile that I can’t even examine them in a document in the privacy of my own computer? Hrmph.

OK, maybe it’s just that I write intuitively. While my organized side loves the idea of breaking down a story into small chunks and using the same structure for everything, my creative side wants to puke at the thought. My creative side wants to run wild and free, never once thinking about what it’s doing, but somehow getting a great novel out through my hard-earned subconscious knowledge of pacing, character arcs, etc.

Huh. That’s highly suspect, right there. It basically assumes I have an innate familiarity with the form that other writers don’t have…yeah, no. Hrmph again.

All right. Maybe I’m just one of those writers who compose a first draft in a flurry of creativity and then fix everything later. I don’t outline before because I outline after. Write now, edit later!

God, if that were only true. The reality is, I’m horrible at rewriting. If a manuscript goes off the rails, I just walk away and try again with the next one. So that makes a hrmph triple play.

The only semi-valid excuse I can come up with is this: usually, when I use an outline, I end up not following it anyway. I start off with a great plan and lose my way halfway through when the story takes a turn, and then I get stuck. But maybe that’s my problem right there. Maybe if I followed them more closely, I wouldn’t get stuck and I would finish them.

Hrmph x4.

I’m starting to think I’m just lazy…

This post first appeared on The Society for Misinvention blog.