Before your begin writing your novel, you have to have your plot outlined and fully developed.
Or so we're told.
Writing has no rules, save to make your story the best you can make it. Other than that, it is a case of 'whatever works for you.' It depends on the writer and it depends on the story.
So why are we advised to outline our plot before we begin to write?
Most failed stories fail because the writer had a great premise and had no idea, beyond this, where to go. Not only did he have no idea where his story was going, he didn't even know where the scene he was writing was going. If you follow your own flashlight beam into the darkness, it's not surprising you get lost.
'Lost' looks like this: writers who keep re-writing the first 12 pages, who write 4000 pages of which only 5 are worth reading, who spend 10 years writing, writing, writing, always 'never quite ready' to send it to a publisher, who sit down every day with panic and fear in their hearts, doing anything, anything but writing.
The standard cure is to write from a developed plot outline. So learn how to do it. But if you find that creating a plot outline kills your appetite for telling your story, if you find it not a help but a straitjacket, then you are either the sort of writer who has to approach your novel another way, or you have an attitude to your work that is usually answered by "Oh, grow up".
Let's look at the two ways of writing a novel, by plot-plan and by no plot-plan.
The overall purpose of a plot is not to kill the joy of creation, but to create a structure for your story that makes it a story and not a long, unwinding noodle of empty starchy calories. A story is a structured narrative, and 'structured' and 'narrative' have equal weight.
At its core, every story has the same structure:
Opening challenge
This is the moment when your protagonist's world changes. Something happens that forces him or her (or them) to act. Understanding what your opening challenge is gives you the basic premise for the entire narrative, and therefore its structure. See my article on Pacing Anxiety about creating a meaty opening challenge.
Chain of challenges
The opening premise kicks off a chain of linked and ever-increasing challenges. The challenges have to be ever-increasing in tension and excitement. As with the higher levels of a computer game, the stakes have to keep rising, and they need to culminate in a gratifying pay-off.
Resolution, or pay-off
This is the final Big Scene: the argument, the feat of derring-do, the ultimate fight between good guy and bad guy, the scene where the detective reveals all and the killer is named, or the mutual confession of love. This is the answer to the question the opening challenge posed. Opening challenge: how will the hero 'X' solve/overcome/gain/defeat Y? Resolution: this is what X does, and Y is solved/overcome/gained/defeated (or, in a gloomier story, Y is unsolved, X does not overcome, does not gain, is defeated by. But let's move on).
Envoi, or close-down
A short final section that eases the reader from the high pitch of tension you've created at the climax to the world again. In thrillers, the author often explodes one final, unexpected plot device, something he planted earlier and, just when everyone is heaving a sigh of relief, BANG, the last unkilled bad guy comes leaping through the skylight. In whatever form, the envoi has to make the reader close the novel with deep sense of satisfaction, be it with a smile, tears, or quiet thoughtfulness.
But, you protest, you want to write something new, different, exciting, moving, not write to some stale formula.
OK, be my guest. Do it. I will bet money that, as you re-write and shape to make whatever it is you're writing a great, readable story, it acquires this basic structure despite yourself. Because that's what a story is. We have a fixed number of musical notes, yet new tunes are created every day. So too with the novel's basic structure. Without it, you have no story. With it, you can write any story you want. That's why you use a plot outline: to write a story, a successful story, a real, proper, finished, publishable story. It works.
Some of you disliked and have rejected everything I've said so far. Some of you feel you are impulsive, artistic, sensitive, you prefer to approach things holistically, you like to wander through the woods of inspiration without a destination in mind, expectant, filled with hope that you will be delighted when you get to The End.
How that's working for you? Finished a publishable manuscript yet?
Having said that, you can write a story where walking through that unmapped forest without path or pre-planned end actually succeeds, but the work happens at a different time.
I'm not saying that you can float through a structureless universe. A story is bound by the laws of the opening scene, and it must follow that logically, as a flower does when it unfolds from the earth towards the sun. This is you telling your story by writing it, or rather by experiencing it in the moment of creation, rather than in the moment of plot planning.
The un-plotted story always begins with a driving force. This is what inspires you to start writing. It is usually your opening scene. You start writing, you keep writing, but to make this 'walk-in-the-woods' end with a finished novel, you have to be thinking about it all the time.
By 'thinking about it', I mean you have to analyse and consider what you are writing. You might have a pad of paper beside your PC (or a pad of paper beside your pad of paper) where you write questions to yourself, argue with yourself: 'If Dan does this here, won't Molly do that?' 'If she knew this fact then, what happens when she has the big argument now?' You have to keep testing and challenging what you are writing with logic and sense while you are writing it.
This might force you to rewrite huge chunks as you are going along, for instance, if you've been following your own sweet way through the woods and find yourself at a dead end. Don't keep trying to write. Stop. Step back, analyse why it is a dead end, throw out everything that led you up this particular garden path, and start again down another road. Maybe you'll come to the same dead-end again. Maybe you'll find yourself at a different dead end, or maybe you'll have found the highway to The End.
At The End, it's time to sit back and analyse again. What story have you been trying to tell yourself? What has emerged from the dark forest you call your brain? What's in this stack of paper, screaming to be let out?
Write down what you now believe your story is about, its 'log-line' (i.e. 'this is a story where X is faced by Y and does Z') Then go through your first draft and write down every scene as a list e.g. '(1) Dan meets Molly (2) Molly's no-good ex-husband turns up at birthday party (3) Dan has dinner with his father (4) Neighbour complains about Dan's motorcycle's noise' and so on. Now explain to yourself how each scene delivers at least one conflict, delivers at least one change, that gets X closer to Z. If you can't find this in any particular scene, drop the scene. Or re-write it until it delivers, but really, drop it. No matter how much you love it.
With a walk-in-the-woods approach, your serious work doesn't come before the writing, but now, after the first, loose, sprawling mess is written and after you have tested each scene to see if it justifies its existence. The scenes that survive now have to be trimmed, shaped, honed, so that all that remains is what gets the characters in this scene one step closer to the resolution. This takes work. A lot of work. This takes time, but you're working towards an ending you have identified and each rewrite brings you closer and closer, the story increasingly focused, increasingly richer, until you finish what is now a novel.
When you've finished, you'll find your story looks uncannily similar to one written to a plot outline, for it has an opening challenge, an interlocking chain of challenges that rise in intensity, a final and complete resolution of the opening challenge, and an envoi. Because real stories become themselves, a structured narrative, if they're given the right earth in which to grow. You might wonder if it was worth all the extra work to write without a plot if you get to the same end-point. If you have a successful, compelling story in your hands, then yes, it was. You just had to tell your story to yourself this way.
It depends on you, the sort of writer you are. It depends on your appetite for hard work. It depends on your eye for an emerging shape. If you feel writing to a plot outline deadens the story for you, makes writing merely a 'connect the dots' exercise, then try the non-plot way, knowing that you will work for longer, work harder, by writing foam that has to be condensed into diamond through analysis, thought, self-challenge and ruthlessness.
If your every attempt to write that walk-in-the-woods ends in failure, circle round and try a plot outline again. You might find that it's actually a relief, but you'll also find that you are still analysing, challenging yourself, thinking hard, being ruthless. You are doing it before you write, not after. Because writing, really writing, is thinking about your story. It isn't a noodle a machine can extrude, it's an act of art.
Writing to a plot, writing without a plot, both take work. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks. In the end, they both come down to understanding that your story has a shape, that it has requirements to fulfill, that it has an essense. Once you understand this, the story doesn't actually 'write itself', you do. Brilliantly.
Copyright Caro Clarke - www.caroclarke.com