On Process: Dirty Outlines

Any post that wants to begin “As every MFA:Fiction graduate I know can agree…” threatens to be drawn out and dull. So here goes.

As every MFA:Fiction graduate I know can agree, going to school to become a better writer burdens you with at least a few bad habits that can take years to shake. Having graduated some three years ago now I feel that my process should be clear of that cruft, but I keep finding new things that slow me down or send me down the wrong path. The fear of overplanning is the latest example.

In school I was taught that to outline was to kill innovation and the ability to jump on new narrative threads as they emerge, as if chapters and characters would jump out from some typo or rambling passage and take over the best threads in the whole story. The idea, as overplayed as it is trite, is that your characters will surprise you. I bought that for a long time, and I still think there’s some truth to the phrase, but what I didn’t consider is what that logic implies (and which I think is incorrect); namely, that to plan out a chapter is necessarily devoid of creativity, surprise, fertile tangents. The other night I came face to face with a chapter that I’ve been working on for months. Yes, months. And part of my inability to move forward is a lack of visualization on how the central scene progresses, ends. In short, I don’t know where I’m going here. So I dusted off some old outline notes and got to work.

Let me go back a step, because I’ve been thinking about this problem of process from a variety of angles, one of which comes from the world of software development. I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about how to build process around software development as a service (hourly rates for developers to solve specific problems and produce working code). To project manage such work, one needs to have discrete goals that developers can complete, with every day (hour, fraction of an hour) bringing the whole closer to fruition. So I tried to apply that thinking to my own writing process, given that the results I generally produce in a given hour of writing would be absolutely anathema to the software project manager. Like, I’d get fired. What is my excuse for spending an entire day–a day that I’ve dedicated to my own writing, my own book–at the desk and not moving the book closer to completion? There is no reason. I decided to project manage myself and keep tabs on how the story is progressing.

Hence the plan. How am I supposed to check off goals if I haven’t created them? This evening I was talking to my brother Peter about his process when working on the first issue of his comic. He’s having a similar problem in that he’ll sit down to work on the comic and end up working on something else. His solution, at this point, is to find and mimic the process of a successful artist, and I think that’s a great idea. (That process is to write, ink, and color one page at a time, taking care to finish one page per day. That’s measurable progress.)

So I’ll end this post by declaring my new dedication to and focus on process as a central (critical) means for moving the novel to completion. And if that involves outlines, diagrams of narrative pace, and other analytical tools, so be it. Besides, who said the act of writing an outline can’t be a creative, surprising act in and of itself?