Outlining outlines

It’s easy to tell someone that outlining is essential, or how to do it. What often gets lost in the noise is why you should draft and why it’s going to come back and haunt you if you don’t.

First off though, let’s establish what an outline for a narrative looks like.

There are only two things mandatory for any story. A beginning and an end, even if they loop back onto each other. The outline of the story tells us how we get from that initial part to the last one. The process by which this is done is iterative, starting with a very rough overview and detailing it more and more until finally a fine enough detail is reached where it’s possible to convert it into the final narrative.

Iterating over an outline doesn’t always need to cover the whole thing. It’s possible to focus on a part of a story, and the final level of detail generally should be applied from the chronological beginning.

Additionally, in drafting the story, it’s also important to remember about characters and the world. These elements form the backbone of the narrative the same way as the beginning and end.

I think that’s enough of a primer on what outlining is.

Now on to why this benefits the writer.

1) The outline sets your narrative goals and certainties

With an outline, you know what you need to achieve (in terms of narrative) to lead into the next part of the story. It’s an essential preventive measure from meandering about pointlessly. While including elements into a story that do not benefit the progression is fine, when done thoughtlessly it often leads to pacing issues or odd unresolved subplots.

When working from a skeleton, you always know what has to happen, can take care of it and only then swoop in to decorate the story with additional content for the audience to take in along the way.

Knowing what comes later lets you better judge when to set up future events, drop hints to things to come and include some mention of parallel events. Looking from the other side, it also allows you to add mention of things that have already happened, even if you have yet to detail those parts of the story entirely.

2) A draft lets you sanity check your narrative before you write it

We all have ideas we think are great. Sometimes it takes us a while implementing the idea to realise how wrong we were. A human mind does not spawn a whole narrative in an instant. They are crafted and honed over time, just as any form of complex expression. There’s only so far improvisation will take you with music and painting. Improvising a poem is still feasible. Doing the same for a long-form narrative (that might additionally contain branching paths and such since this is, after all, a video game blog) is not.

Additionally, at this point salvaging the writing becomes harder the more detail you have put into it before needing to reconsider something. Important information may slip, leading to plot holes and a non-congruent narrative. At best it’s going require some work to fix. At worst it will be virtually impossible to set straight without going over everything from the beginning.

A lot of inexperienced writers think they can just write a story from beginning to end, without ever needing to go back to adjust something. Humans are not infallible though, and errors don’t just sometimes happen, they are inevitable. And that’s fine. Mistakes are part of the creative process. The first idea you have is rarely as good as those that will emerge later when you give yourself time to think.

3) It’s external memory for all the information about your story

This obviously ties into things I’ve said already, but I want to elaborate on it separately.

Humans are not nearly as good at remembering things as they like to think they are. You forget things constantly, sometimes completely, and sometimes they just slip your mind for a little bit. Outlining a narrative helps you with remembering everything. Or reminding you of it when you forget, at the very least.

If you have a draft, you can always page through it, looking at things at various levels of detail and looking for things you might have missed. But putting the information in front of yourself like that helps with expanding and detailing your story or world. Perhaps finding interesting interactions between characters or some tidbit of your setting you want to bring to the forefront for a while.

Likewise, getting a sound basis for your characters down from the very start gives you a foundation to build one. Same with the world. After all, it’s quite likely both the characters and the world of your story existed for quite some time before the narrative itself started.

To sum up. Writing a story without an outline is a bit like building a house without a blueprint. You can do it, but why would you? You’re just inviting a disaster into your future.