Things I've Noticed About Writing a Novel Outline

A few observations about outlining, gathered from watching too many novels stall in the planning stage:

The outline you have before you start writing is less important than the outline you make after chapter five, when you've learned something about your story that you didn't know going in. The first outline is a guess. The second one is informed.

Agatha Christie reportedly said she worked out the solution to her mysteries before she wrote the opening paragraph, then wrote the novel working backward from what she already knew. Her readers thought she was discovering the mystery alongside them. She was staging a performance of discovery.

There's a version of outlining that's really just procrastination with extra steps. Color-coded index cards, three-ring binders, plot software with seventeen fields per scene. If you've spent more time organizing your outline than writing prose from it, you already know what I'm talking about.

E.M. Forster's distinction between "story" and "plot" is still the most useful framing I've found. A story is "the king died, and then the queen died." A plot is "the king died, and then the queen died of grief." The outline is where you turn your story into a plot. Without it, you often don't know which scenes are connected by causality and which are just adjacent.

An outline is a hypothesis, not a contract. The draft is the experiment.

Most writers outline the external story and forget to outline the internal one. Your protagonist's external journey: from the wrong side of town to the manor house. Your protagonist's internal journey: from believing they don't deserve a life to believing they do. Both need to end at the same scene. If you've only outlined one of them, you've only outlined half the novel.

The writers who say they don't outline usually have the clearest sense of where they're going. They've internalized the structure they claim to reject. Ask them enough questions and you'll hear a full three-act breakdown come out in conversation, described as though they just stumbled onto it.

Your outline is most useful at the scene level, not the chapter level. "Chapter 12: conflict between protagonist and mentor" is too vague to help you write anything. "Scene: protagonist finds mentor's draft letter resigning from the project; mentor doesn't know she's seen it" is specific enough to sit down and generate the actual scene, because now you know who wants what, who knows what, and what's at stake in the room.

Joseph Heller had the first line of Catch-22 for years before he wrote the novel: "It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him." Once he had that line, the structure of the book followed. Sometimes the outline starts from a single sentence, not from a plot grid.

One thing I'm still not sure about: whether discovering your story through the draft is more efficient than planning it out first, or whether that depends entirely on the writer. I've read convincing arguments in both directions and I still don't know who's right.

An outline for a thriller is different from an outline for a literary novel in one specific way: the thriller outline needs to track information. What does the reader know and when? What does each character know and when? Agatha Christie tracked these things meticulously. Elizabeth George's notebooks from her novels (she's published excerpts) show detailed scene-by-scene information management, with columns for what each character believes to be true at each point in the story.

The writers who abandon outlines mid-novel usually don't abandon the outline because it stopped working. They abandon it because the draft is doing something more interesting, and they're smart enough to follow the draft instead of insisting the plan was right.

Anne Lamott's "shitty first drafts" advice applies to outlines too. The outline doesn't have to be good. It just has to be specific enough to get you out of your head and into a scene.

A good outline makes you feel like writing. A bad outline makes you feel like you've already written, which is a strange and particular kind of lie you tell yourself when you've mapped the terrain so thoroughly that walking it feels redundant, even though the map and the territory are not even close to the same thing and never have been.

If your outline reads like a synopsis you'd send to an agent, it's too polished to be useful. The working outline should be messy, full of questions you haven't answered and brackets where you wrote [FIGURE THIS OUT LATER]. That mess is a sign you're still thinking, which is the whole point.

Every morning, before you open the draft, re-read your outline. Notice what still feels right and what the draft has already outgrown. That ten minutes of adjustment is more valuable than however long you spent making the outline in the first place.

That morning re-reading is a kind of daily practice in itself. A few minutes of looking at the shape of the thing before you step back into the middle of it.

That's what we send writers every morning. One lens to look through before you open the draft.

Get tomorrow's reflection free.

Stop staring at the blank page. Start writing with purpose.