Author's Notes on: Outline Aftercare and Execution
It's only just begun
I can’t say this post is a direct continuation of my original post on outlines [See here, if you haven’t read it], but I imagine it might make more sense if you’ve already read that one and have most of an outline done.
So, let’s assume you already have part or most of an outline done for whatever you’re working on — that’s great! …But you’re still far from having a book* written. Making the outline doesn’t mean it’s paint-by-numbers from here on out.
*I use the term book here, but honestly this applies to any kind of creative writing you might be doing!
Changes
Speaking from experience, your outline is going to go through changes as you write. Sometimes story beats or pacing decisions sound fine originally, but once you actually get around to writing them they just don’t feel right anymore.
Creative writing suffers (or rather, benefits) from a butterfly effect with each interaction you write. The more you write, the better you understand your characters and your vision for where you want the story to go. Every small change about your characters and how they react to the story they’re in will change how they react in the future, and thus what feels like a good situation to put them in.
Maybe a single line changes everything you thought about a character and/or their dynamic with others, and it sparks your interest. Suddenly instead of being just a greedy scoundrel, they’re a scoundrel with a heart somewhere in there, and a scene you’d planned of their betrayal has a lot more weight. Or perhaps the more you write a character the more they develop into someone with charm and an affinity for taking risks, and the scene of them hiding from danger doesn’t make sense anymore.
If you’re still set on a scene, there are definitely ways to workshop them to fit them back in, but it’s good to recognize when a puzzle piece doesn’t fit as is and changes need to be made. Maybe the scoundrel chooses friends over gold instead of the betrayal you planned. Maybe something else motivated them to take the gold and go through with the betrayal anyway. At no point are you effectively locked into any one course of events.
There will be some courses that feel more natural than others, but you can always find a way to make something work if you’re really set on it.
Otherwise, never forget that you don’t need to leave scenes on the cutting room floor forever. If you really love a scene and it just doesn’t fit in your vision anymore, cut that scene out and put it in a separate document. You can always use the template for the scene later.
I do this all the time. I had a scene I LOVED that involved a prison break from a fantasy-style dungeon, with the protagonist being aided by a friendly stranger in the same predicament — but when they recovered the items that had been taken from them when they were imprisoned, they realized they bore the colors of two factions that vehemently opposed each other. Suddenly there was tension, unsure if they could trust one another, but they still had the entire rest of the dungeon to escape and neither could do it alone.
It was a fun scene that I very much enjoyed workshopping, but as I wrote more about the characters and setpieces it was supposed to pertain to, the setup needed to get them both in that situation felt like I was jumping through too many hoops just to try to make the scene work. I still wanted the scene to play out as planned, but the dungeon eventually wasn’t a dungeon, it didn’t make sense for either character to get imprisoned in the first place, and by that point in the story they already knew they belonged to opposing factions.
At some point, the context of the story had deviated so far from my intention that trying to make the scene work as originally intended in my outline didn’t make any sense.
I cut it out and workshopped a much more fitting scene, but I’ve saved that idea in a folder somewhere and it remains in my writing arsenal for a time when I can use it.
Speaking of other things that change when you start writing? Let’s talk pacing.
Sometimes when I write outlines, I throw a bunch of related bullet points into a box and call it a chapter. Boom. Done, next chapter box — GO.
…yeaah. Works great for getting those ideas out and down on paper. I definitely recommend it for that. But once I started writing, it quickly became apparent that the material was definitely not a single chapter. It’s not really a matter of length (considering you can make a chapter as long or short as you want) but more of a situation concerning dramatic timing.
It’s a little like knowing when to start your next paragraph. Paragraphs can be any size in theory, but the more you write the more you get a feel for where you like to end a paragraph and start the next one. Putting everything on its own line takes away from the impact of single statements. Paragraphs group the information together into manageable pieces, but if you let them go on too long they become difficult to stomach.
Your chapters could be any size in theory, but it’s useful to group parts of your story together into digestible chunks with related pieces and following a narrative flow.
All those bullet points didn’t look like much in the outline, but once I got writing, it quickly became clear that I needed a chapter break between some of the scenes I’d planned. I know for a fact that there are several more chapters that this will also happen to in the future, being separated into two or even three chapters depending on how things go.
Too much happens in them for my taste. They feel like a chapter equivalent of a run-on sentence.
For all I know there may be chapters in the future whose beginnings get absorbed into the chapter before them and whose ends get integrated into the chapter after them, effectively disintegrating a chapter I thought I needed. It’s not paint-by-numbers, but there is a certain amount of playing by ear that goes on after the fact, even when you’re actually writing from your outline.
Change is always an option.
If something feels or sounds wrong, take a second to sit back and look at it. There’s always a decent chance that it’s just nerves — the things you’ve written don’t always look right to you but are perfectly fine to others. But it also could be things like a plot thread vanishing or a character suddenly not doing things that are in-character.
Your outline is not the end all be all of your story. It is not etched in stone.
As a final note for this section of the article, a problem I’ve also faced is having an outline/plan, but when I go to write, I just… run into a brick wall. I know where I want things to start and where I want them to end, but actually getting there makes my mind go blank.
Hitting a wall that hard can be upsetting and even a little scary at times, wondering if you’ve suddenly lost all motivation for the project. Sometimes you have. But sometimes you just need to take a look at it from a different angle. Change up the presentation of the scene, or how you’re writing it. Even changing the weather can dramatically adjust how you view the scene and how you proceed with your intended plan.
If you hit a wall, most of the time the problem isn’t going forward or what you’re writing right then, it’s what you wrote that led you up to where you are. The solution isn’t charging straight at the wall, it’s retracing your steps until a way around the wall is visible.
Clean-Up
Cleaning up an outline for me generally isn’t about polishing, meaning making it perfect. Polishing an outline sounds good in practice but for me at least it seems unnecessary. You don’t need a perfect outline to start writing. Cleaning for me is more about clarifying points and scenes as you get a better understanding of how they will play out knowing what you know now about your characters, pacing, and plot.
When I write an outline, there is generally a mix of scenes and events that I like and want to see proceed as I envisioned, and ones that are there for thematic purposes and putting something else there with the same goal in mind won’t fundamentally change how I view the progression of the story.
Not to spoil anything major for Sleepless for any paying subs, but the chapter I’m currently working on is like the second option. The chapter exists to provide more information about the world Sleepless takes place on, and thematically it’s there to further reinforce the protagonist’s feelings of isolation — especially from her peers.
My outlined plan for how to do that was fine, but it just doesn’t feel quite right anymore. It introduced a lot of places and characters that wouldn’t be relevant again in the book, and after having written the chapters leading up to it it feels like there are some plot threads that the original plan for the chapter/book would have dropped entirely.
In short, the execution just felt like it could be so much better.
Now that I’m more familiar with the setting and characters, I’m able to make the decision to substitute the original scene for one that fits much cleaner into my vision for the story.
Whereas Sleepless has a full outline, The Cardinal Directive has more of an end goal and several thematic elements and plot-relevant things I need to keep track of. I’m much looser with Cardinal’s planning, but it still goes through routine cleanups, so the general process for Cardinal is as follows:
Outline — I write outlines for the next ~3 mission logs/chapters. I have a dedicated physical journal for this actually, and use a pen because pens are easier to see and keep their line quality longer than pencils do.
Writing — I start writing! Very fun
Oh No (Kinda) — Everything immediately starts going off the rails but it’s really fun so I keep it in
Notation — I write any changes I’ve made to the original outline on the back of the page where I outlined it
Oh No (Actually) — It’s been a few logs since I’ve done any outlining. I’ve lost the plot. All my plans are out the window. I’m flying blind. It’s the garbage fire of a century
STOP EVERYTHING — Stop writing. Break out the metaphorical evidence board with the red string and connect all the ideas together in a satisfying way so I know what I’m doing again
Once More, with Feeling — Return to step 1 knowing what I know now and repeat
Cardinal’s cleanup process is a lot more about regrouping my thoughts. If you’ve ever seen or experienced the dreaded death wobble (usually in a motorcycle or car) or seen someone run so fast their legs can’t keep up, it’s a lot like that on a literary level. Cleanup and regrouping is the delicate art of not ending up eating dirt one way or another.
This is due in no small part to the fact that Cardinal is being published serially, and I treat it as though I am writing it in pen. I of course go in to fix grammatical mistakes that I catch after publishing and whatnot, but unlike Sleepless, where I have left the option open and transparent that I may go back and change things in the final draft that gets published physically, I treat Cardinal as though that is not an option.
There are entries from Cardinal that I already feel I could have done a much better job with, and if I was writing it as a book I definitely would go back and make some adjustments to those chapters. The way I write Cardinal though only moves forward in a metaphorical sense. While I may write some entries taking place in the past (as relative to the present in the most recent entry at the time), I can’t actively retcon anything that’s happened so far. I can flashback to explain why something is the way it is, but I generally can’t say that something that existed in the first mission log doesn’t exist anymore.
If you’ve written an outline for something and consistently find yourself abandoning it to go off-script, and furthermore if it’s driving you up a wall figuring out how to make it all fit together without changing anything you’ve put to paper before, I highly recommend returning to the basics and regrouping your thoughts every now and then.
For me, I do things like make lists or create visual maps for what plot points intertwine where. Making a list, whether mental or physical, helps keep things present in my mind so major elements never disappear (at least not for long) from the narrative. The maps meanwhile help me plan for outlines, connecting otherwise disparate plot points in ways that I can explore and utilize in the future.
If you want to try the mapping, it’s pretty easy to get started. Just take all the most prevalent plot points in your story and put them in circles on a page. Then just draw a line from one circle to the other and write on the line how the two ideas connect. You can do this with characters, plot points, organizations, themes — really anything. Feel free to add sub-headers in smaller circles and connect those together too!
You’ll start to notice the more things you connect, the more there will be elements that have a ton of connections and elements that have very few.
It’s a great way to visually see which parts of your story you’ve got pretty solid how they work together, and which parts need some attention. Just knowing these two things makes adjusting an outline a lot easier.
As was briefly mentioned, I also keep a lot of notes about how my outline changes from the original idea. For best practice, I keep it somewhere close to where the original outline was written. You can do this on the back of paper, in a notepad, via comments on a digital program, or any other method by which you keep track of your writing.
The reason behind it is simple:
If your final execution is different from your initial intention, you want to have a record of how it changed so you can remain intentional with your future execution.
Fun wordplay, am I right? Point being that the clearer you keep your vision of how you want the story to go, the easier it is to make strides towards that. If part of your brain is still stuck in the effort of preserving elements of the original outline, it’ll show in the final product.
Don’t be afraid to commit wholeheartedly to something, and don’t be afraid to change your mind if you don’t end up liking how it comes out. Your outline is there as a base and a reminder of your guiding principles for the project — nothing else. It is still open to change and reinterpretation as you write. It is still more than okay to tidy up some parts that ended up going differently than expected.
Care for your outline, and it will care for you. The more effort you put into making and/or maintaining a plan for your vision, the better prepared you’ll be during the writing process.