Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [38]
These are all decisions you make as a writer. You may make them quickly and spontaneously and intuitively. You may elect to tell a lot or a little about this sort of bit player. The success of your novel will not stand or fall upon the way you handle him, as it well may hinge on your treatment of major characters, but all characterization plays an important part in the overall impact of your fiction.
Chapter 6
Outlining
An outline is a tool which a writer uses to simplify the task of writing a novel and to improve the ultimate quality of that novel by giving himself more of a grasp on its overall structure.
And that’s about as specifically as one can define an outline, beyond adding that it’s almost invariably shorter than the book will turn out to be. What length it will run, what form it will take, how detailed it will be, and what sort of novel components it will or will not include, is and ought to be a wholly individual matter. Because the outline is prepared solely for the benefit of the writer himself, it quite properly varies from one author to another and from one novel to another. Some writers never use an outline. Others would be uncomfortable writing anything more ambitious than a shopping list without outlining it first. Some outlines, deemed very useful by their authors, run a scant page. Others, considered equally indispensable by their authors, run a hundred pages or more and include a detailed description of every scene that is going to take place in every chapter of the book. Neither of these extremes, nor any of the infinite gradations between the two poles, represents the right way to prepare an outline. There is no right way to do this—or, more correctly, there is no wrong way. Whatever works best for the particular writer on the particular book is demonstrably the right way.
I’ve written quite a few novels without employing any outline whatsoever. The advantage of eschewing outlines is quite simple. With no predetermined course, the novel is free to evolve as it goes along, with the plot growing naturally out of what has been written rather than being bound artificially to the skeletal structure of an outline like a rosebush espaliered to a trellis.
The writer who does not use an outline says that to do so would gut the book of its spontaneity and would make the writing process itself a matter of filling in the blanks of a printed form. At the root of this school of thought is the argument first propounded, I believe, by science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon. If the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, he argued, the reader can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next.
There’s logic in that argument, certainly, but I’m not sure it holds up. Just because a writer worked things out as he went along is no guarantee that the book he’s produced won’t be obvious and predictable. Conversely, the use of an extremely detailed outline does not preclude the possibility that the book will read as though it had been written effortlessly and spontaneously by a wholly freewheeling author.
Some time ago I queried a hundred or so authors on their writing methods. A considerable number explained that they didn’t outline at all, or prepared minimal outlines at most. Here’s Willo Davis Roberts echoing Sturgeon’s Principle:
I seldom outline, except insofar as I have to come up with enough to interest an editor if I want a contract before I do the book. Often I do not know how a suspense novel will turn out until I get to the last chapter, which is more fun than having the end all planned beforehand.
Tony Hillerman takes the same position, not because it’s more fun necessarily but because it’s what comes naturally for him:
I have never been able to outline a book. I work from a basic general idea, a couple of clearly understood characters, a couple of thematic and plot ideas, and a rough conception of where I’m going with it all. I also work with a clear idea of place. I tend to write in scenes—getting one vividly in