Outlining

As a new writer, I have only recently become involved in the spurious debate about outlining. I say it's spurious because eveyone who doesn't want to waste time outlines. In one way or another, they outline. This free-wheeling attitude about writing from the heart is fallacy and results, I believe, in disjointed stuff.

To quote from Alastair Fowler's new book, How To Write, “It is unprofessional to put finger to keyboard or pen to paper without any idea of the scale of a piece; no one has time to write words that will have to be discarded.”

So there.

Tough Questions

What went wrong?  Why didn't that guy duck?  No one can be that stupid, can they?  Why is she with him?  No one told her it was going down?

Every story is an unconscious game between the storyteller and the audience; a puzzle with a race to The Answer.  That Answer is what the storyteller is trying to keep from the audience as long as possible while the audience is nimbly trying to guess it.

How quickly can the audience guess all the answers if at all?  If it's too soon, we dismiss the tale—too easy, too pat.  If we don't or can't or God help you, won't guess it at all, then the pivotal point is whether we can't because the story is incredibly cryptic and/or illogical or because the story's development is sluggish (not enough clues in the proper places) and the tale becomes boring.  However, the salient characteristic here revolves around questions and as a storyteller, you'd better be ready for them.

So, here's the deal: better to ask yourself those questions now while you're building your story than afterwards.  And here's another deal: those questions have to be tough, the ones that blow holes in your story.

You know the ones.

To refer back to my chess analogy once again: you've got to play both sides and mercilessly so.  You've got to ask and answer those tough questions and you'd better answer those questions with a modicum of logic or you'll really anger your audience who will have invested the time.

If the audience is not able to guess correctly, then they'd better be able to follow the logic of the story backwards after the revelation.  This is one of the best scenarios and it can be seen to good effect in The Usual Suspects.  As an audience member myself, realizing who Keyser Soze was in the few final scenes brought on an immediate series of interconnections spanning the length of the story as I asked myself: did it make sense that this man is Keyser?  And after, when those questions were asked and answered adequately, I realized how much I enjoyed the tale.

So prepare for those questions and if, in crafting your tale, the answers are too pat, or too easy, or too difficult, or too illogical, revise the story.