Making Plans

Once there was a girl who had a thing about planning. She hated having a set itinerary for Saturday night, and it annoyed her that school had to stick to a schedule. The girl's cousin, who mapped out everything in her life to fifteen-minute increments, made her break out in hives. She didn't like planning out her novels, either. While her writer friends often told her that they already knew the endings of novels they just started, she wanted the stories to be in control, as free as plastic bags caught in the wind. Knowing what was going to happen was boring, structured, predictable. So like her parents. Of course, it took her sixty times longer to finish a story. But that was the artiste way, right?

And then. . . someone bought her book project—a complicated book project with four main characters, a mystery, a killer, a stalker, tons of secrets, and flashbacks from past to present. She got a deadline and had to figure out a bunch of things fast. It didn't take long to realize that the plastic bag in the wind thing wasn't going to fly.

Outline, a voice whispered in her head. Just try it. So she reluctantly did. And within a few hours, she had mapped out chapter one. And two. And three and six and eleven. The outline helped her figure out how the characters would get from A to B, and it gave her moments to work toward. It didn't stifle her artistic process. And she got the book done on time.

OK, the girl is me. Now the outline and I are kind of friends. Sometimes I use an outline a lot, intricately planning each chapter. Other times I jot down just a couple of sentences to keep my story on track. It's not like the outline has solved all my problems—I still get stuck on plot, and sometimes I outline a story that, when writing, I realize doesn't work. And just because I write an outline doesn't mean it has to run my writing like a controlling boyfriend. I might think of a better scene that's not in the outline, and I just go with it. I use a 70-30 rule: 70% of my story sticks loosely to the outline, 30% can veer off somewhere else, if needed. And I'm not even breaking out in hives.

Do you outline your stories? Or do you like to just let stuff happen?

Sara Shepard
Author of Pretty Little Liars