How many of you use outlines?

I think this has a lot to do with what you want your writing experience to be like.

 

I use outlines. It's so much easier to be able to look at the thing you're trying to plan rather than just writing and seeing where you end up, in my opinion.
I used to not use an outline and my work was slow and I didn't know my direction. Now I write faster and I have a sense of what will happen.

 

I need to find a happy space between pantsing and ridgid outlines. I find I can wright well once I get started but have trouble starting or getting distracted easily. I want to practise brainstorming for 5-10 mins before writing, and having a clear goal for each scene. The most important thing for me is not bending the story to ahear to the outline. I like my rabbit holes.

 

My guess is that no one really writes exactly the same way. Perhaps this is part of the creative beauty. Since the journey should be also enjoyable and not only that final product. Personally, I find an outline to be very helpful since my thoughts are at times all over the place. This has me writing a 'working script' and the final one. My tendency is to work on both sometimes all at once. I tend to edit quite a lot and have been working on my current project for multiple years. This allows for me to observe my thinking process along the way while appreciating specific changes.

 

An interesting video about outlining methods -

One method of outlining in the video is writing beats, or telling your story in paragraphs. I think that has a lot of validity. Whatever allows a story to coalesce is valid.

The last method, writing into the dark, is interesting too. The idea is you keep outlining as you go to stay organized. I keep notes, but that might not be much of an endorsement of the idea. I'm not exactly successful as a writer. Yet.

 

For novels, absolutely. Such projects are simply too big for me to keep track of everything without a written aid. It's not set in stone or anything--I've deleted a subplot and merged various chapter concepts--but having a road map is very useful. I don't usually get super detailed, either. The outline for my current novel is only about 4,000 words.

Short stories are more complicated. I rarely ever write out an outline for a short, and when I do I usually diverge from it quite a bit. That said, I don't really pants it on the stories without a written outline. There's almost always one in my head, even if it's vague.

 

5 more:

11. Vogler's "Stages of hero's journey".
12. Trubys 7 key steps.
13. Trubys 22 steps.
14 Hauges "Six-stage plot structure".
15. Snyder's Beat Sheat.