Plans

I'm not the kind of person who makes outlines for my writing. I don't plan things out before hand, at least not in depth, and don't try to use references to make connections between different things. Trying to follow some kind of plan messes me up. I know that doesn't apply to all people, and I'm not saying that people shouldn't use outlines if that works for them. I'm just saying that it's not a thing that works for me.

I've tried to do it in the past. It's kind of hard to avoid doing, almost every teacher I have ever seen has insisted that I make an outline before I write things. Trying to follow that outline really messes me up. It disrupts the organic flow of a piece for me. It makes me feel like the end result is clunky and mechanical. It feels distinctly like I'm falling an outline, which makes it boring and slow. I don't fully understand how people write that way. I mean, I can respect people who do that, and they must have a really cool way of thinking that they can make an outline and still make their paper sound good. That's cool. I just can't wrap my brain around how it works.

In some ways, I understand that it hurts me. I routinely have trouble writing stories, because I don't know what the end goal is, or I don't know what events are going to happen on the way to that goal. It's a problem I recognize and am working on fixing. But for me, an outline is not the way to do that. I would rather set a story aside and come back to it years later than try to force myself to plan it all out in advance.

One of the really cool things to me about writing is the way that my story can very abruptly change. Readers are surprised and intrigued if you can write a good plot twist. By the thing that they don't realize is that as a writer, when I write that twist, I am just as surprised and intrigued. That's how I know I'm doing it right. But when I plan things out, if that happens, I don't want to deviate from the plan I've made. So I try to force my story to continue on its original path, and that's where it starts to fall apart. My characters don't want to do what I'm trying to tell them anymore, and it becomes a pain rather than a joy to continue writing.

Being a writer, to me, means having a certain degree of multiple personality. And it means embracing that, and utilizing it. One of my favorite things I've ever heard about a writer was that as they were riding a bus, thinking to themselves about a story they were writing, an idea occurred to them. They realized something that was going to happen in their story and, amongst a crowd of strangers, excitedly proclaimed, "Yes! I get to kill him!"

That is so hilarious and awesome to me. Obviously it sounds bad to people that don't know, but in context, knowing better, that is a hilarious story. And stories are what we writers live for.