What’s an outline really worth?

When I was in school I hated outlines. They were the death of spontaneity, I thought. Rules of the authoritarian paper-pushers to force me into their mould of what writing should be about.

In hindsight, I was really objecting more to the idea of doing something extra and early. Nearly every paper I ever submitted in school was written the night before. In one particularly memorable instance I wrote it 3 hours before it was due.

Part of the problem was that I’d been rewarded for my procrastination. The 3-hour masterpiece? Read aloud to an auditorium of nearly 200 other college first years as an example of “unique perspective.”

Now I write outlines, especially because the plotting can get pretty damn complex when you’re juggling 9 stories that interweave and are often non-linear. But never does the outline tie me down. The picture in the blog heading shows what happened to just one page of Descant! They are definitely excellent starting points, they can even remind me later where I meant to go. Believe it or not, that can slip a writer’s mind :-D

In their best incarnation, they’re a springboard for the creativity and thinking I spend a lot of time chasing around in my brain.