I’ve been a committed planner ever since I started to write. Words have always felt too slow, even while I loved them, so I had to tell my stories in big, sweeping strokes first, just to capture it before it could get away. This may be an AuDHD thing, but no-one knew that at the time. All I knew was that I wanted to tell people my awesome story now, and not after ten minutes’ set-up — but without that set-up the story made no sense. So...
So my oral stories were pretty much impossible for anyone to understand, and they’d slip through my fingers before I could get a proper hold on them. There was a sort of transporter-portal thing, and a flooded castle (mansion?) and a feud and a pending disaster and...
And then I began to write.
Suddenly I could get the bones down on paper and fill in the gaps later. The core ideas were captured, and the story could grow from this seed (to thoroughly mix my metaphors) into something like the magnificent whole I had glimpsed when the story first arrived in my head.
I fell in love with outlining. And while I understand people who feel that an outline restricts their creativity, I know that for me an outline is more like a climbing frame. It gives me a solid structure on which to build, and lets me go higher and further than I could on open ground.
A recent conversation with a friend provided another reason I might be attracted to outlines. We were talking about memory, and how odd it can be. My friend said that when she thinks back on her day, she can remember the “bullet points” — where she went, what tasks she did, and so on; but she struggles to remember the “in between” moments: how she got from A to B, brief conversations between important tasks, etc. When she said that, I realised that my memory works in a similar way. For example, I can remember that conversation, but not what was said before or after.
In other words, when I write an outline for a story I’m thinking about it in the same way that I process real-life events. I think in bullet points, and fill in the details later. And because different brains work in different ways, other people probably have different ways of processing memories.
When I read novels that included diary entries, I used to feel that the novelist was using a bit — or a lot — of poetic license with how people write real diaries. Surely there’s no dialogue, no detailed descriptions, no smooth flow of events in chronological order in a real diary? It’s more likely to be a collection of isolated incidents, or a simple list of events, or a rant about the weather.
Well, that’s what my diaries were like.
But perhaps there really are people who can sit down and write a scene — invented or remembered — as a coherent narrative right out of the gate. Who don’t need to jump right to the most important part and then go back and do the build-up afterwards. There might be people who can type at the speed of thought, and get their stories down entire and complete in one go.
But I am not one of those people, and so I will go right on using outlines. And telling long, rambling stories that branch off and circle around, and lose themselves in…
[This post was written without the benefit of an outline.]
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