To Outline or Not?

Remember in school how we had to learn to outline, then would have that exercise in class where we would have to outline something we weren’t interested in writing in the first place! Well, the time has come to put that skill into practice—maybe.

Sometimes I make an outline and sometimes I don’t. When I started the book, Portable Writing, I made an outline of what I wanted to cover in the book because there was so much material I wanted to include. All of the projects were taken from my experience, or those of some of my friends, and I knew I could easily forget something if I didn’t make an outline. It’s lucky I did! Immediately after I wrote the outline, I had an emergency health problem that laid me low for three years. During that time, I completely forgot about my book idea and the outline.

Finally, a little over three years after my health scare, we started traveling in the motorhome again and I found my outline safely tucked away. It was like running across something I’d never seen before. I thought to myself, ‘this is a great idea for a book,’ and began writing it right away. The book took longer than it probably would have if I had started it in 1998, when I apparently wrote the outline, but I finally finished the book in 2006. Without that outline, it would never have been done.

That’s not to say that I stuck to the outline. I realized after writing a couple of chapters that I wanted to reverse the order and put those in the back of the book. And most of the time I just typed away, only referring back to the outline after I was finished with a chapter to make sure I had covered everything. It also help when it came time to write a proposal to submit to publishers.

Now that said, I didn’t make an outline for the new book I’m writing on history, other than a list of historic events during the past 65 years that I could recall off the top of my head. That’s what I mailed to those of you who requested it. It’s definitely not an outline, just a memory jogger. With this book, I simply sat down at the computer and started typing, starting with the forties. You can’t outline memories and emotions. That just seems too sterile for the subject matter.

Should you outline your idea for a book? For my first book, Make Room for Success, 1992, I don’t recall if I made an outline or not. I probably wrote some notes down so that I would remember to include certain points or illustrations. And I’m sure I had clippings in a file from previous articles I had written to make sure that information was included.

For the novel I’m currently working on, I made a list of main characters and their personality traits as well as some memories from my career as an interior designer and from RVing that could be used in the book . My lead character in the novel is a young interior decorator living in a place I never lived who gets a chance to travel with her aunt in an RV and encounters a mystery. But to say I wrote an outline would be wrong. I’m not even sure how the mystery will be solved yet. It will evolve as the writing of it evolves.

Sometimes I feel better just jumping into my subject matter and typing as fast as I can before my idea flees. Maybe I’ll make some notes to include somewhere in the article or book, but other than that, an outline becomes a distraction rather than a help.

But is it an important tool to have in your arsenal? Yes! My English teachers didn’t waste their time, but I’m betting they would be horrified if they saw how regularly I ignore that particular lesson.