It's Just A Tool, Silly

[akirlu]

I hate outlines. I hate feeling obligated to get the format right, with Roman numerals for thesis statements and capital letters for support statements, and Arabic numerals for supporting facts, and all the rest. I hate having to stuff my thoughts into little boxes that get ticked off as you move down the outline. It's so restrictive and confining! It's like having to wear a straight-jacket while swimming the crawl.

Hell, I hated the whole process of learning to generate numbered bibliography cards and numbered note cards, and then using the notecards to make up outlines in order to write reports that followed the order of the outline. All that regimentation squeezed absolutely every ounce of joy out of both learning new stuff for the report, and out of the process of writing it. I learned to hate formal research in the fifth grade, and I don't think I ever fully recovered. Because I hated them, I have never used notecards or outlines very effectively, or indeed at all when it wasn't mandatory. To me, all that meticulous documentation felt essentially like additional make-work I had to do over and above writing the report, not at all like aids to organizing my writing.

But you know what? I don't have to use them. They're just tools. And any given tool won't be right for every job or every hand. That's my big insight this morning. It just struck me: I am not a bad person for hating outlines. They are just the wrong tool for me. This idea was so very liberating, that it might actually free me to using outlines, and note cards, at times when they would actually help. Because I don't have to use them.

Ordinary, sane persons will be nodding in a soothing, trying-not-to-appear-patronizing sort of way about now, because ordinary sane persons will have known all along that formal outlines are not some sort of moral obligation. But to me, it's huge.

So maybe now I'll get some use out of this handy tool they taught me in grade school. And that's a good thing, because as an adult, I just don't have much call for my cunning ability to make salt maps of Hawaii.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Sometimes outlines are useful in retrospect; that is, when you've gone rushing through your story and suddenly you aren't sure you're headed the right directions, and did you actually forget to add in that one character that makes the ending work, you can outline it so far. And see how it is, in fact, part of a whole and not wild volunteering and crazed outliers.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I think you're absolutely right that some form of outlining what you've already written, so that you can see the underlying bones of the story and check whether they fit together the right way, is a terrific trick to have in your bag.

What I just realized this morning, while updating yesterday's word count over at thing_in_150, is that I have wasted a lot of energy and momentum resisting all sorts of outlines when what I really object to is formal outlines. Narrative outlines work just great for me, they're a wonderful tool, and I love them, because they're just like telling a story. They *are* telling a story -- the story of the story I'm going to write. Or, in the case you're suggesting, telling the story of the story so far. Anyway, right you are. Good point.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I used to work from rough outlines, and it helped, but then I outlined a big, sprawling, complex novel of maximum coolness--and balked. I can't write The Winter Bride as outlined because the outline took all the joy out of it for me. Man, am I bummed. But that's okay, I'll get at it a different way.

Your epiphany is a good one: tools, not rules.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Wow, sorry to hear that about The Winter Bride. I guess that's another example of the tools getting in the way of the process. But you are God's Own Finisher, so I know you will get at it a different way. There's more than one way to walk around a rock.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

In the years I went to school, I only had to do outlines twice. Both times I wrote the paper first and then the outline.

I've found during the years since, that there are people who really need an outline in order to write a coherent paper (or to get errands done, etc.) and people who don't. I'm a don't.