Why outline? To get you where you're going

By Dick Thien
Chips Quinn Writing Coach

For the writer's sake, it's a good idea to have an outline.

For the reader's sake, it's an even better idea.

When the word "outline" is mentioned, many writers think of the kind that grade school and, sometimes, high school teachers insisted on: Roman numerals and capital letters, lower case letters and 1's, 2's and 3's, filling at least two pages. Boring.

Well, that is not the sort of outline good writers use.

Instead, they jot down the main elements of their story, putting them in the order that they think makes the most sense. They try to be logical. Some pretend they are putting one literary foot down at a time, marching toward a conclusion that satisfies the reader.

If they get hung up -- what some writers call spaghettiing -- they often realize that they have more reporting to do. Or, they know they have to leave something out, especially if the story bogs down when they read the first draft out loud.

Those writers who fail to outline usually do just fine with their lead, their nut graph and, often, with the first eight paragraphs or so.

"I outline in my head," they say.

"I know you do," a frustrated editor says. "I've been reading your stuff for three years."

Readers also can figure that out after getting to paragraph nine. From there, most stories that come from an outline in the head go nowhere and end nowhere. The outline-in-the-head writer almost always ends with a quotation sandbagged from the notebook to plop in the story when the spaghettiing starts. That's not an ending, of course, but it ends the writer's suffering.

"I don't care what you've heard, or what your literature teacher said, or even what the writers themselves said," Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize writer, says. "Every writer of any merit at all during the last 500 years of English history outlined virtually everything he wrote."

That is a strong observation with no proof offered other than logic in his book, Writing for Story (Plume, 1994). Is Franklin out there on that proverbial limb or do those three words of any merit get him off the hook if he is challenged about the value of an outline?

No.

The power of their prose, its logical flow and the structure of their stories clearly show that Maya Angelou, Suzan-Lori Parks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and W.E.B. DuBois outlined. Their writing is magical, and an outline was the wand that made it so.

It turns out that they are joined by hundreds of good writers who think the same thing, writers who outline their material in the hope that they can move from being good to being excellent.

There are no rules for an outline. It can be three sentences or 13 paragraphs. If a writer finds things in her notebook that fail to fit in her outline, that's a strong hint that the material doesn't belong in the story. A good outline contains only the best that a writer has.

It is no coincidence that William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White in The Elements of Style (Allyn & Bacon, 2000) have two separate entries on outlining, the only repeat of a composition principle in their 85-page masterpiece. They call the outline design.

The first entry, "Choose a suitable design and hold to it," says:

"A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing. Writers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition. Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. This calls for a scheme of procedure. In some cases, the best design is no design, as with a love letter, which is simply an outpouring, or with a casual essay, which is a ramble. But in most cases, planning must be a deliberate prelude to writing. The first principle of composition, therefore, is to forsee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.

"A sonnet is built on a 14-line frame, each line containing five feet. Hence, sonneteers know exactly where they are headed, although they may not know how to get there. Most forms of composition are less clearly defined, more flexible, but all have skeletons to which the writer will bring the flesh and the blood. The more clearly the writer perceives the shape, the better are the chances of success."

Strunk and White's second entry, "Work from a suitable design," reinforces their first entry this way:

"Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise and work from a suitable design. Design informs even the simplest structure, whether of brick and steel or of prose. You raise a pup tent from one sort of vision, a cathedral from another. This does not mean that you must sit with a blueprint always in front of you, merely that you had best anticipate what you are getting into. To compose a laundry list, you can work directly from the pile of soiled garments, ticking them off one by one. But to write a biography, you will need at least a rough scheme; you cannot plunge in blindly and start ticking off fact after fact about your subject, lest you miss the forest for the trees and there be no end to your labors.

"Sometimes, of course, impulse and emotion are more compelling than design. If you are deeply troubled and are composing a letter appealing for mercy or for love, you had best not attempt to organize your emotions; the prose will have a better chance if the emotions are left in disarray - which you'll probably have to do anyway, since feelings do not usually lend themselves to rearrangement. But even the kind of writing that is essentially adventurous and impetuous will on examination be found to have a secret plan; Columbus didn't just sail, he sailed west, and the New World took shape from this simple and, we now think, sensible design."

You have nothing to lose, everything to gain and a roadmap to get you there by outlining. As the Nike ad says: Just do it.

About the column

Write It Right is updated regularly. Have a suggestion for a future column, contact Dick Thien.

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