The outline-Gorman
Graham Greene felt that he wasted his early writing years by not outlining his novels in advance. Wasted too much time he didn't have.
I have to say that his books did get better as he got older but whether this was due to the outling I can't say.
I wish I could outline. The few times I've managed to fix an outline on both the page and in my mind, I was more relaxed with the writing itself. I didn't wake up in the middle of the night depressed because I couldn't figure out what next day at the machine would bring.
I've thrown something like seven or eight full novels away in the past twenty-some years. And double or triple than in long false starts. And mostly because I just couldn't shape the would-be book into anything coherent.
Because I write two thousand words a day, virtually every day of the year, I'm able to to finish and revise most of my novels in a bit more than three months. So throwing whole books away isn't a total disaster.
One of my editors told me once that she thought the false starts I threw away were my first drafts. She pointed out that while I struggled with depression and occasional migraines in getting a hundred pages down--pages I'd inevitably throw away--I was actually prepping my materials the way a sculptor does before he or she begins serious work on a piece. She was right on one point. A lot of thrown away pages do help me rough about the story and the people so that when I start over on page one I write very quickly straight through to the end.
Maybe that's just my process and there's nothing I can do about it.
But damn it seems great--from afar--to be one of those folks who outlines a book and then sits down and writes with barely a hitch. Or does that ever really happen?
posted by Ed Gorman | 4:28 PM
2 Comments:
I get the feeling that James Reasoner, with the able assistance of Livia, of course, is an ace outliner. Maybe he'll weigh in on this.
I've written books from 60 page outlines that were really highly condensed versions of the books themselves, and I've written others with no outline at all, just a vague sense of what the plot was going to be. I'm not really that comfortable with either extreme. Although taking off and winging it with no outline can be fun . . . if everything works out right. These days I like a nice six to eight page outline so that the basic structure of the book has already been figured out before I start. I usually write these even for books where the publisher doesn't require an outline, just for my own benefit.
All that said, I don't think I've ever written a book that turned out exactly like the outline. Some unexpected plot twist or character always pops up during the writing of the book itself.
And Bill is right, I've written quite a few books from outlines that Livia created with little or no input from me.
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