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Outlining vs. Freewriting, Structure in Narrative WritingBy Bryan Lee Peterson**The following essay can be found at mindofbryan.com, and heard on thepodcast “The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group.” All text is copyright 2008Bryan Lee Peterson. If you want to use it, please give a citation back to theoriginal web site.**Writers in general are a curious bunch of people, especially when it comes toanother writer's process. The curiosity is most often centered on outliningversus freewriting, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes notall that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrumbetween these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and someare completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just anindividual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind whenwriting commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writingprocess. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do someearly exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outlineand writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are twowords for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writingand you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject tostart with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not justthe skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my ownlife was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writingtelevision scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, andhe wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outlineand scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle,but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His nextepisode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. Hewasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’torganize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story,and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that hewasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue,but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I knowat the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, whichfor me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writertalking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s everhad to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learnedhere. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had
 
times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had itwritten out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writersare generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, anaccepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makesyou a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being agood writer.Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all getworked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happenswithout paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I waituntil a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as Ihave, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so theprocess is much more on paper.With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning andusually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. Infact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. Myoutlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptionsmay be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will befinished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages,my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning thatto a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty fivecomic pages. It blew him away.I really consider this my first draft. My friends who are writers can’t evenmake heads or tails out of it, but it all makes sense to me. When I write myfirst attempt at a finished product, I don’t look at this as a rigid outline at all.Sometimes scenes merge, sometimes they drop out, sometimes they move. Ikeep a mind on it being an organic story with real characters who don’tnecessarily act as they were expected in the outline phase. This is a fear of organic writers, that the outline will force them into a plot that is not natural.If we remember that the outline is mutable, we lose that worry. We can keepasking ourselves “what would this character do next?” but it might berephrased, “is this really what this character does next?”I often hear the questions, “I have a middle and no beginning or end,what do I do?” or “I have a world and a few scenes and characters, but Idon’t know what to do with them.” My suggestion is to arrange what youhave, either in a file or if you prefer to work more concretely, on note cards,and try to write the scene in either direction. As that question, where doesthis go? How do these link up? What does this character do next? What led tothis scene? When we come up with ideas for books, the first plot points wecome up with are the big ones. I’m going to use Star Wars as an example,since it is one of the most universal cultural events that is worth analyzing.I’m going to put money on the notion that Lucas didn’t get a great idea aboutpicking two robots out of a line-up, in particular one that can speak tomoisture vaporators, and the rest of the story came from that point. It is amundane scene that serves only to get the droids to Luke. I’m guessing
 
Lucas started with points like the Death Star blowing up and rescue of Leia,and then filled in between.Now, it seems to me that most beginning writers don’t think aboutstructure, and this is because they don’t teach structure in a lot of classes.We all remember, probably, the rising structure of the story. We start with aninciting incident, build it slowly, but with certain acceleration to a climax, andthen have a slight denouement. It looks something like one delta wave cycle,or maybe a saw wave. I think this is one structure, and the most basic. Itworks for short pieces, and in larger pieces, on a whole. If we look at afamous story, the first Star Wars movie, we start with the inciting incident—Leia’s ship being boarded. Then we drop to this small unwitting desertplanet, and rise to the inevitable big battle that blows up the Death Star. There are other climax points, though. We rise in tension until Dantooine isblown up. Then we hit the first climax, the fight in the prison block. Theescape is another little climax, and then we get to the big battle.I think there are other structures. My next book is based on a spiral, ormore to the point, a fractal, and The Hidden is also. The first sequences inthese books are a microscale version of the rest of the book. In the HiddenMalcolm wakes up, finds he is being attacked by a demon. He discovers whatis happening, has a brief confrontation and then dispatches the offender. Then the story moves on, and the pattern repeats a couple times on an evergrander scale. In Inside, my next book, Michael has an art showing, his sistercomes in with trouble, his parents come to visit, the protest happens outside,the showing is infiltrated and attacked, with some innocent people caught inthe crossfire, and we are all left standing wondering why this has to happen. This expands into a plot where similar events happen as the conflict growsand the stakes get higher until the final climax of the book.Let’s look at some common structures from various media, and see whatwe can extract from them.Screenwriters and filmmakers employ a couple different structures: actsand reels. These are simultaneous structures, and I’m much more used tothinking in acts.In terms of reels, let’s imagine that every movie is 90-120 minutes. Thisnumber works for most films. There is a physical limit to how much film wecan load onto a projector, and that’s something like 20 minutes. That is areel. I hear reels being used more in pitching a movie, and producers like tohear very significant things about the first reel, explosions, car chases, abody, whatever really gets the action going. Most acts wind up being tworeels in length. If we think about it, most movies have a very significant plotpoint 15-20 minutes in. Maybe this is a good number for the average movieviewer, the point where we make a decision whether this movie is worthanother hour or so, and so we put something major here, just to keep theviewer interested. After this point, we’ve got them.I don’t think we can aswriters of novels think in reels, but there are lessons to be learned in thereel. First, the inciting incident needs to come early. There is no better way tolose readers than to bog them down with exposition early. Second, as a
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