Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Importance of Outlining

The Importance of Outlining

This class I have been teaching for New Horizons Academy has been as much a boon for my own writing as for anyone else.

First there has been the research and mining a host of nuggets that in themselves don’t sound particularly profound but taken collectively and integrated properly can make a huge difference in the quality of what you write.

The most important of theses is the outline which provides a structure. An organization for the many components a writer needs to consider in planning a quality work.

Historically I wrote shorter pieces that tended to be sequential and were lacking in serious complexity. I could string these ideas together, one after the other and follow my muse as we started to write about them. “Get the story down on paper, I told myself and you can edit it later and polish it up a bit.

As a result of my failure at novel writing I realized that my biggest problem was a lack of structure and resolved when deciding to teach the One Act Play course that even though such a drama was not long in words it required many of the same components of a larger drama compressed into a smaller place.

In order to teach these principles it became clear that an outline was essential before any attempt was made at the actual writing. As this dawned I began to realize what I had been reading in the research. Many playwright spend months on the structure of a play before actually writing anything….I also see this being mentioned in screenwriting…. That a team of writer will brainstorm and outline for months before actually writing scripts. I sense that at writing.com many just start pushing the pen and seeing where the experience is going to lead.

Often I see it written that this is a question of the style in which a writer writes but I am convinced as time goes on that such an approach is doomed to failure….first the idea that you just need to get something down on paper and you can clean it up later is flawed. Trying to retrospectively add structure while it is possible in certain linear simple works does not fly as complexity is added. Once something is written, it is an agony to go back and try and salvage it into something that is structurally sound. There is a rigidity that sets in once the actual words are being written and while they can be amended or tweaked or polished substantive change becomes increasingly difficult as the complexity goes up.

Thus my advice is to think about your story and brainstorm it others that have a structural understanding of literature….As dramaturge I can take liberties with the dramatic content of a writers materials and make suggestions that would be considered too intrusive by many aspiring writers.

This dynamic is working in the class even though it is causing pain for the students….However, it is much easier to write a good drama if you have a good story to start with that contains all the dramatic ingredients… a story worthy of a writers efforts.