Why Is Outline Important When Writing Fiction?
This can be very subjective and can often depend on the author’s method of creating their story and getting their message across. Some authors can happily write away with no plan of where their story is heading or who is going to populate it along the way. This can sometimes lead authors down rabbit-holes that end up becoming dead ends for their storyline and they will then have to reverse engineer the story back to a point where they can head into a new direction.
By writing in multiple genres, I have given this route a try on my children’s stories that I share with my friend, Steve Boyce. When we created The New Adventures Of Cornelius Cone And Friends series and the Bennie Barrier’s Big City Adventures series, a lot of those storylines were created simply from ideas that we had stumbled across in our everyday lives. There was no plan to them, they simply came together based on something that we had seen or heard.
Steve’s idea to create the world of Cornelius Cone was inspired by a sign that he noticed whilst queuing in traffic which said “Cone helpline,” and gave a phone number to call. Working as postmen, we both encountered some rather eccentric people on our rounds and this gave us the idea for the characterisation of beloved characters such as Bertie Bin, Tricia Trolley and Grandad Cone.
Whilst visiting my father, who is a big Johnny Cash fan, I heard the song, “Wednesday Car,” which was written about a man who only drove cars that were made on Wednesday’s as he believed it was the only day of the week that the engineers were fully focused on the job in hand. This gave me the idea for Postman Pete to only use vans for his deliveries that were made on Wednesday and leading him to criticise any vans which had broken down that were made on any other day of the week.
When I decided to write my adult crime fiction series however, I needed to maintain a consistent theme throughout the novels. With Cornelius and Bennie, I was creating short stories that could be read and enjoyed singularly by readers where, in this new genre, Blake Langford’s life story became the subject of these novels which could all lead into each other to create a complete series. Because of this change, characterisation and consistency with location and subplots around the main storyline needed to keep a degree of similarity to avoid jolting the reader out of the overarching storyline that was being created.
To do this, although Blake Langford is a fictional character, I needed to have a deep understanding of his character, the way he talks, the way he acts, his mannerisms, close friends, colleagues, what is important to him in his everyday life and all of this needed to be consistently recreated across the series of novels. Any inconsistencies or contradictions between the novels from characters that readers have come to understand and relate to so far will lead to the author alienating the readers and jolting them out of the storyline.
I heard a quote from Lee Child when he was talking about his Jack Reacher series; “Readers are looking for the same but different.” There are over twenty Jack Reacher novels where Reacher goes to a small town, meets up with some local people who are being targeted one way or another by an oppressive threat. Reacher methodically works out how to undermine and overturn that aggression into the victim’s favour before moving on to the next town or city. Now, if Lee Child repeated the same storyline with the same characters and the same ending every time, the series would have been a flop. Nobody reads the same story twenty, thirty, forty times over. But it’s the consistency that Lee Child has brought to the characterisation of Jack Reacher that has kept readers coming back for more. When someone picks up a Jack Reacher novel, they know what Reacher is likely to do, how he reacts to people, what’s important to him. It’s the same but different and that is created by planning and remaining consistent to the original idea that has made the Reacher series a huge success.
After the recent release of the fourth Blake Langford adventure; Wheel Of Deception, I began looking into where the story was going to be heading for book 5 of the series. Following a similar pattern as Lee Child has done with Jack Reacher, I knew that I needed Blake to remain consistent to the characterisation that he has built up over the past four novels without repeating scenarios and storylines that had already been explored. This then led to a flood of ideas and notes that I had made whilst writing the previous novels. Book 4 ended with Blake and Paula deciding to book a date for their wedding so logically, book 5 will pick up from a time after they are married. The next step was to work out how this would change the dynamic between Blake and his family and colleagues. Michael, his son, would now be a teenager so how could a rebellious teenager impact their lives? Looking back to book 2, Blake had a one night stand with Beth Hayward who is also the God-daughter of his boss. Are there any consequences from that which could be explored?
Throughout the Blake Langford series, events and pieces of information that have been included throughout the novels tend to have a significant role to play at a later date. Having the crux of an idea is only the beginning and in creating an outline for your fiction, you can avoid heading down rabbit-holes that could potentially lead your story to an unexpected dead-end that you would then need to reverse engineer to get yourself out of it. Keeping your readers engaged with characters that act, talk and relate in a consistent way will avoid jolting your reader out of this magical new world that you have led them into.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are creatures of habit in a complicated world and we look for comfort in the familiar whenever we can find it. Outlining your novel can be a crucial part of keeping your reader happy, don’t cut corners or you may find yourself regretting it later.
Until next time, write on.
John Roberts