Outlining

I have a friend who HATES outlining.

I totally don't understand it.  I want to say I get it, but I don't.  I'm a totally detailed person, but that doesn't mean I'm a drip.

The assumption is that it cuts off creativity at the balls.  It doesn't allow you to go where the idea takes you.  It makes everything stale and static and formulaic.  Expected.

I would say that it does the exact opposite.  I love to outline because when I get an idea in my head, I love to get it down.  That doesn't mean that I have a clear idea of the story and I get the plot down on paper right away.  It means that I have a thought and I put it down.  I sometimes send myself an email with a thought.

That doesn't sound like outlining, does it?

I'm a fan of the bullet point as well, don't get me wrong.  But I like having the virtual pieces of papers that I write ideas on in a shoebox.  For me, the pieces of paper are emails and the shoebox is an inbox or a file I've created.  I also need time to think about the idea.  And I don't want to forget and I don't want to get off a train of thought, so I send myself an email.

If I have a larger idea and I have an idea about structure, I get that down right away as well.  I have another play that I'm planning to write that centers around speeches.  So I wrote an outline that explained what the speeches were about and then what the scenes in between them could be about.  Then I tried a structural idea I had.  It's just two to three pages in all.  But it's giving me a sense of what the shape of this play might be.  And it's there in my computer.  So when I look back at it in a few months when I pick this play up to start writing, I can see what ideas still resonate with me.

For me, outlines are markers so that I can just keep thinking and free associating.  I have ideas that I don't want to forget.  And I don't stick to them.  But they give me a mountain, a structure, to repel off of.  The stronger the structure, the harder I can push myself away from it.

Sometimes it's just a list.  A laundry list of things that I think should be in the play.

• Four characters
• A subway
• Songs
• Wind
• Monologues

If I'm obsessing about something, I throw it in the play.  Plus, when I'm watching or reading something for research an idea will pop out.  And if I have an outline or a story document to plug it into, the play starts to build organically.  But that's the way my mind works.  I need to have organization externally because internally I have a lot of ideas popping up and I want to be allowed to free associate.

It keeps me on track, but it doesn't keep me from moving.  My outlining is not static at all.  It doesn't tie me down.  It's just a foundation to build on.  And I do it with my TV scripts (obviously) because I need to have a sense of rhythm and act breaks and how things build.  Those scripts are so tightly structured.  But I do it with plays in a looser sense.  Even though with I Want It, I'm not doing a story outline. But I have a list of things that need to happen.  I have a list of characters I want in the play as I think of them. I didn't start out knowing exactly what this world would be and who would be in it.  As the characters started coming to me, based on what I needed to tell the story, I started writing them down and identifying them.  But this play is different.  I have to have a different way of approaching it so that the end result is different.

So I don't buy it when people say that they hate outlining.  It only helps.  And the way you organize your thoughts is up to you.  But it definitely affects the end result.  At this point in my writing, I would find it difficult to do any other way.

I kind of need it.  Creating something out of the ether is so unstable and unpredictable.  It's nice to have something to hang onto.