Author's Notes on: Honey, I Broke the Outline
Woops? What to do when you break an outline!
With this release coming out on Halloween, I’d really hoped to write a creepy short story or something to that effect, but unfortunately, this week has been a particularly long one and I’ve found myself without the energy needed to do something like that.
Instead, I settled for something that’s been scaring me personally for the past few weeks: I broke Sleepless’s outline.
First, some context. If you’re new around here or aren’t a paying subscriber, Sleepless is one of the stories running for paid subscribers every other Friday.
It and its Friday-release buddy, The Cardinal Directive, are very different stories with, in my mind at least, very different styles and pacing, and the reason why isn’t hard to guess — Cardinal, the passion project that it is, has gotten this far with little to no outline. Sleepless meanwhile was planned as three books and had a complete start-to-finish outline.
Had.
We’ll get into that in a second though.
Another detail that’s important to understand is the difference between planners, pantsers, and plantsers. I don’t know if NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) created these terms, but they were where I first encountered them.
Planners are people who come into a story knowing exactly how they want it to go, equipped with outlines and all kinds of other character guides and resources. Pantsers are called that because they fly by the seat of their pants, which usually means they just sit and write and let the characters guide how the story flows. Plantsers are the middle ground — a bit of structure, a bit of freedom.
This past year of writing consistently for Author’s Notes has taught me a lot about myself and my own writing style. First off, I can’t stick to outlines for very long. Sleepless managed somewhat, but Cardinal spent most of its runtime with no outline because I could only plan 1-3 mission logs in advance (because I’d inevitably deviate from the plan the second my fingers hit the keys).
Second off though, I’m not great at being a pantser either. When I pantser things, I tend to throw spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks, spending too much time on some interactions and not enough on others as I test out ideas. Cardinal suffered from this a bit in its early stages because I really didn’t know what I wanted the series to be yet.
I am pretty firmly a plantser. I need enough structure to know what I’m trying to accomplish, but not too much that I can’t improvise and do what feels best for the characters and story.
You may be able to tell where this is going.
So… yeah. I broke the outline.
Now, the outline has been incorrect since chapter one, as the original chapter one instead got divided up into chapters 1-3 on substack. but it wasn’t broken. It was still functional and contained a lot of scenes that I was still planning on doing in that order.
But now it’s broken.
So let’s talk about it.
How did I manage to break an outline?
Some of you might be confused about what I mean that I “broke” the outline. I consider this to be different than just having deviated from the outline because I do that literally all the time. I didn’t know how chapter three was actually going to go down until I’d written chapters one and two, and that increased clarity changed a lot of what happened, though the chapter still ended right where I intended it to.
Deviation from the outline usually covers times when I want to spend more focus on a plot point, character interaction, etc. than planned, but I still end up roughly where I thought I’d be in terms of major plot points.
Breaking the outline is more about the fact that throughout Sleepless’s (currently 26-chapter) runtime, I have deviated several times from the outline in ways that felt natural to the story and its pacing. Enough times that I didn’t make room for certain characters and subplots to really get explored the way I thought they were going to be. Enough times, to be exact, that massive parts of the original ending could no longer work the way they were intended to because the character beats that were supposed to set them up didn’t happen.
This has left me effectively 75-80% of the way through the story and suddenly grappling with the knowledge that most of what I planned to happen for the ending would not only happen too fast, it would come almost entirely out of nowhere.
It’s important to note here that Sleepless has gone through several drafts. I’ve been thinking about doing the story since high school and it has seen SEVERAL revisions since its original concept. Even moving from the outline to the actual story, there were huge shifts in character interactions and plot elements that I wasn’t originally anticipating.
The more I wrote the story, the more confident I was in the story I wanted to tell. Which was great! Except for one teeny tiny outline-breaking problem: the story I wrote in chapter 1 isn’t the same story I’m writing in chapter 26.
It’s good to remember that the version of Sleepless being posted here is the first draft. In the coming months after the story finishes, I will likely continue to publish updates on what’s changing in the story and why, because, as is, the story doesn’t hold up to my standards for myself.
I feel there are loose ends both character-wise and narratively that exist only because I started this project with a different idea of how it was going to go than it ended up going. Some details that were important in the original outline are never talked about again in the story, and some characters that originally had full arcs were dropped because the places where those arcs were supposed to occur didn’t make it in.
So… what now?
This all might sound really bad, and in some ways it is. Like I said before, I’ve been scrambling to figure out what to do now that it’s become incredibly clear that I cannot use my original outline going forward.
Honestly, though, this is just what happens as a plantser trying to use a rigid outline. I was doomed to break this outline because I was doomed to deviate from it in favor of scenes and pacing that felt more natural at the moment rather than obeying the outline.
And, what’s more — it’s not the end of the world!
Did I drop certain subplots and character beats? Yes. BUT those are still arcs and interactions I want to explore and have the capacity to explore.
Is my ending ruined because I don’t have the proper setup for it anymore? Yes and no. My original ending can’t happen the way I envisioned, but I still spent the entire book setting up future payoffs — they just weren’t the payoffs I planned for in the outline.
I broke my outline. I didn’t break my story.
Step One was accepting that this first draft was not going to be perfect, but that it was more important to get it written than to fix it now.
It can be tempting to shut down when you see something is veering off course. You may find that a full-stop works best for your style or if the story has gone completely off the tracks and you don’t like what you’ve made. For me though, if I stop, it’ll never get finished.
All first drafts are messy. That’s okay! A first draft’s only job is to exist and give you a better idea of what you want to do, and that’s what Sleepless’s first draft did for me.
No matter how good of an idea I think I have now of what I want to do with the story and its ending, it will NEVER be as good as actually writing the ending and seeing for myself how I want it to play out.
Step two was stepping back and looking at what I had created so far, taking note of the elements I wanted to keep as throughlines and what had been dropped midstory.
Questions I asked myself:
Why did I drop this in later chapters?
Is it important to the story and needs to be added in, or can I remove it from earlier chapters for no longer fitting with the story vision?
What did everyone’s themes and character arcs become as opposed to my original vision?
What themes were emerging from this version as opposed to the outline?
Did I want to foster those themes, or did I need to go back to the drawing board to emphasize the themes I wanted to explore in the beginning?
Step three was organizing those thoughts into action for the future, determining what arcs were important to the story I was trying to tell in this book and which were subjects I really wanted to explore, but not here or not yet.
I constructed a new, very loose outline that pays off the emotional beats I have set up so far, rather than the ones I thought I was going to have prepped.
I’m still in the process of deciding what scenes and things I want to add or remove from this current draft and save for later. Most of this work will be done after the final chapter is written and I have the best possible idea of the style, tone, and message I want to send.
What’s the end result?
A new ending for Sleepless, of course! One that is built from the interactions and themes that have been present through this iteration of the book, not my idea of what it was supposed to be.
But what about all those arcs and things that didn’t make it into the first book, or will have pieces of themselves removed to better fit the scale of their importance here?
Sleepless’s original planned trilogy is expanding into a tentative tetralogy, and honestly, with the way I write, there’s every chance that more books will be needed as I continue to explore Margo and her story. The best part about self-publishing is that I can make these decisions myself, catering to my writing style and needs.
So, our four-book series will instead be: Sleepless, Dreamless, Boundless, and Endless.
Adding an entirely new book to the roster is intimidating, but I think it’s the best option going forward. It’ll allow me to take details and events that feel out of place in Sleepless and move them to Dreamless so I can focus on making the things that I want to stay work even better.
It also takes the pressure off my shoulders knowing that I don’t have to fit everything into this first book. There’s a lot to explore both in the world of Sleepless and in Margo’s story, and now I have the time necessary to give everything the weight it deserves.
I don’t know how much will get moved to Dreamless. There’s a chance we see radical changes to the story and its structure as we know it, but I won’t know for sure what those changes will be until I’ve finished the first draft.
Takeaways
Writing a book, like most other large endeavors, rarely happens in a straight line. There are valleys, hills, setbacks, and sparks of inspiration that come with every project. You will rarely if ever get something like this perfect on the first try.
Sleepless’s first draft gets messier and messier the clearer my idea of the story becomes because my perspective on the chapters I’ve already written changes. Something I wrote a year ago and was really happy with could still be a good chapter, but doesn’t quite fit the themes I want anymore. Change is a good and natural part of writing.
It’s also worth noting that when I started writing Sleepless, I had only just gotten back into writing after several years on hiatus. My skills were a bit rusty still, and when you’ve gone some time without working on or with a skill, you’re going to have to accept that the first few tries are going to show that rust. But, if you keep with it, you’ll find you get better and better each time.
Breaking an outline is terrifying, but it’s not a bad thing. It’s an opportunity to reassess the story you’ve created and adjust accordingly for the future.
Plus, no matter what happens to the current version of Sleepless in the future, its existence helped me get the tools, knowledge, and experience to better understand my story and writing style.
So, if you’re in a similar situation, either struggling to force an outline to work when it doesn’t — or having just realized like I did that your outline is too far gone — take a moment. Breathe. Accept that this is something that happens and isn’t the end of the world, much less your writing career. Look back at what you’ve created and learned both about yourself and the story you wish to tell. Isolate what makes your story what it is and what you could do to better highlight it in the revision process.
This could mean any number of things that might be a bit nerve-wracking — adding an entire extra book, adding or removing scenes you thought were integral but don’t fit anymore, throwing out the plan for the front or back half of your book — and more. You might have to take a chance and throw some ideas at a wall to see what works best.
But even if it’s scary, don’t let it scare you off of writing! Trust that this is a normal part of the process, not a reflection on you. Trust the process, trust yourself, trust in your story, and you’ll find a way to the light on the other side one way or another.
Happy spooky season everyone, and thank you for reading!