I. Outlines and Me
A. Way back when
Like so many of my writing students, I acquired my negative feelings about outlines in school. I put them in the same category as "Time problems" -- you know, if train A leaves the station at 6AM traveling twice as fast as train B, which leaves at 7 but is carrying one third the passengers, who all paid half fare.....I just shut down when I heard 'em coming.
B. College
It's funny, but I did use outlines a lot in college and grad school -- always for non-fiction! The Roman Numerals and regular numbers, the Caps and lower case letters: it all made me feel I had things under control.
C. As a Teacher
And today, with students who like them, I love to see outlines. People who know how to use this tool, can often cut to the chase much faster than I can!
II. The Cost of Saying No to Outlines
But personally? I don't use outlines for fiction. From the beginning, fiction, for me, required something else. Being organized didn't give me the feeling I was making headway, that there was something better than my draft up ahead on a road I couldn't yet see. As I write this, it seems totally ridiculous, since I know that good non-fiction has logical and emotional arcs, uses hooks, even features characters. So the distinction I made long ago seems pretty arbitrary, but it is soooo ingrained...
Which makes it pretty clear that no, I've never used outlines, or flow charts, for storytelling. Which means, in turn, that I have sometimes gotten myself into nasty chronological snarls, with characters born after they'd met someone important, or children born to people who should have still been in diapers. In such cases, I've had to go back after the fact, and make a list and set things right.
What do I do to compensate for my OAD (Outline Aversion Disorder)? The "organizational" tool I use with every novel, the one I rely on totally, is a free-write notebook. Each time I begin a novel, each place I'm stuck, whenever I dream or think of something relevant, I take it to my characters. I ask them to write me in first person, and give me their response. Eventually the notebook is filled with chunks of their voices discussing the big and little moments in the novel, as well as in their lives before and after the book. That's my outline, my bible, my safety net. I can shuffle those chunks in any order I want, try out different chronologies, alter, delete, expand any or all. But together, they are what gives me the feeling I'm working on a book that's bigger and better than my draft so far. They are what I aim for, where I'm going, and they always, eventually, tell me what my book is about.