They say that no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and this is true of fiction outlines, too. I used to be a diligent planner and plotter. I would meticulously plan out every scene of every chapter. That’s how I wrote most of Between Heaven and Hell, my first novel. And frankly, it shows. The book doesn’t really start to soar until the last ten chapters, where I kind of ditched my outline and just raced along, trying to keep up with my characters.
King talks about this, too. He says that novels are found things, like fossils in the ground. The novelist’s job is to unearth as much of the fossil as possible while breaking as little as possible. When I first read that, I wasn’t sure I really believed him. Sure, that might be the way he writes, but I was happy plotting my story, thank you very much.
Well, now I’ve written four novels, Between Heaven and Hell, Do Over!, The Unification Chronicles: Mistaken Identity, and this month (and next, I’m not done with it yet by a long shot), Homeworld. And I can tell you that King is definitely on to something. If you have strong, well-rounded characters and an interesting situation to put them in, you don’t need much of an outline. My outline for Homeworld only lasted for the first 35,000 words or so, just enough to get the characters to Mars. Now I have a vague idea of what I expect to happen, but my characters surprise me every day and take the story in new and unexpected directions. And if I’m surprised and delighted about where the story is going as the writer, I bet the reader will be surprised and delighted, too.
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