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Young Writers Society


To outline or not to outline?



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Sun Apr 01, 2007 1:59 am
Prokaryote says...



Outlining is painful, at least for short stories. If you're trying to write a novel, on the other hand, I can't imagine how you'd keep track of the plot without an outline.

Whenever I write a short story I just get a vague sketch of beginning, middle, and end in my head and just wing it from there. Like Pros and others have said, it can really limit your possibilities if you have a rigorous outline, and can put a stopper on your "creative flow." (Whatever that means.)

I guess it just depends on the person, judging from the comments.

Prokaryote
  





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Tue Apr 03, 2007 7:47 am
Elelel says...



Well, I do sometimes and I don't sometimes. Depends.

The "creative flow" (fantastically silly term, there) issue with outlines has never been a problem for me because I can just change it. I guess that might be an issue if you wrote on paper and couldn't alter huge blocks very easily, though.

It really helps me if I outline, because if I don't my stories end up as piles of constantly changing ideas, meshed with tangents (which just shows how many curves there must be) and plagued by little pockets of unconvincing corniness, which insist on eating plot holes everywhere and are simply too clever to get caught in the rat traps I forget to set. Rather like that sentence, in fact. So yay for outlines, in that respect.

But sometimes I like to just ramble. So I just ramble.

But I think it all just depends on the person. Some people work best with everything planned perfectly, others need a basic frame, and the rest just preffer to power ahead and sort it all out in the rewrite(s)

If anyone doesn't know what they should do, I recomend trying everything and seeing what works best.
Oh, you're angry! Click your pen.
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Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:36 pm
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AWritersFantasy says...



It usually depends on the story for me. For the last story I was working on (for almost two years), I had an outline. For this story I'm trying to work on, I'm attempting to outline, mainly for the purposes of trying to figure things out about the world/characters, but also so that I can have all the ideas on paper/on the computer and not only in my brain.
  








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