Why I Don’t Do Story Outlines — Ever

Why I Don’t Do Story Outlines — Ever

The fastest way to a plot-driven disaster is to plan the story.

Image by deagreez1 via DepositPhotos

I’m about to give some of you as writers nightmares, or at best a good case of hives. And I can hear some of you already, “How in the hell do you write a good story without a story plan?” Or an outline. Or chapter notes? Post-it stickies?! Something? Anything!?

Nope. I don’t use them. Ever. And there’s a very good reason. Actually several reasons. Not the least of which is I don’t need them. These so-called writing tools only slow down my creativity, and they distract and corral the people in the story from doing what they most naturally would be doing.

We’ll explore more about this in a moment…

Too many authors are told and taught to only write a certain way — namely someone else’s way. That process of pre-planning your story down to the nth detail can be stifling to the plot, destructive to the imagination, and ultimately lead to a bad overall creative process.

Honestly, I don’t have that level of patience. I want to get writing!

The truth is, I’m not the only novelist who writes this way. I’ve met quite a few who write the way I do. And after a lifetime of writing, then publishing over 25 full-length novels in various series, all with 4 and 5-star ratings on Amazon, including 3 Vella serials, the work and my “no-planning process” pretty much speaks for itself.

And you can do it too. Or at least give it a try. With a bit of practice, maybe some trial and error, and just a little bit of your own creative magic you never knew you had, it will work for you too.

Start with an Idea

Sure, you do have to start somewhere and that usually begins with some kind of idea of what will be in the story. For me, it’s usually some kind of romance relationship I want to develop between two or three or sometimes even four people. Honestly, when I start writing the story I don’t know how many are going to be in the final “ship” (relationship).

If you were thinking I just write “straight” romance, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Harley Austin is an insufferable relationship junkie where even the hero and/or heroine often do not keep the relationship totally monogamous. But that’s just me and the kind of stories I like to write. I like to explore very diverse relationships, how they happen, and why.

Typically, the relationship becomes one of the focal points of the story, but not the focal point.

“That’s called ‘erotica’, Harley.”

Yea, whatever. People in my stories do fall in love. Otherwise what’s the point? I don’t like to pigeon-hole or stereotype anyone’s work, including my own. My stories often give the term “cross-genre” a whole new meaning.

Also, somewhere in the relationship or even the point of the whole story, there is going to be a “kink” of some kind, something different about the “ship” that most people will find strange, probably immoral, perhaps even reprehensible to modern sensibilities. Good. Now I’ve hooked you.

When I say “kink”, I am not talking about simply writing a “gay” or “ménage” kind of relationship. That’s pretty much standard these days. A kink has to be something strange but interesting to me and to the reader. It also has to be plausible within the context of the story’s setting. And oftentimes these “kinks” kind of just show up on their own with me not planning them.

If you write something simply for the “shock” value, you are going to run the risk of turning readers off, they’ll junk your story and never pickup one of your books ever again. Whatever your “kink”, make it unusual but plausible. If it’s sadistic or just stupid, again, you’ll lose the reader. Oh look, another plot-driven rape scene. [Yawn — ] You have to be more creative than the rest of the crowd.

And by stupid, I mean if your kink is some chick being “taken by the alien werewolf king” you need to grow up. I have no idea who writes or even reads crap like this, but at least write some serious material. If the title of your story starts with the word “taken”, there’s a good chance you need to delete the file and start over.

So there’s my soapbox, one of many, actually. We all have them as writers.

Image by deagreez1 via DepositPhotos

Just Start Writing

With my “ship”, story idea, or whatever plot I’ve conjured up now firmly in mind, I then start writing an opening scene that begins building a story toward that point of where boy meets girl, or girl meets girl, or whatever. You get the picture.

Here’s where I’m probably going to lose many of you as writers: I often have NO IDEA where the story is going, nor what’s going to be in it, nor how it’s going to end. NONE. I drop a person into the setting and then start writing to see what they do.

“Wait — what?!”

You read that correctly. I write to see what they do.

“But, Harley, YOU’RE the one telling them what to do! You’re the writer!”

Sure, but I’m not directing what they do. Somewhere in this fertile brain of mine is an imagination that is both creating AND following the people in the story. THAT’S where the magic happens!

Follow the People in the Story

I want you to notice something here as well. I do not have “characters” in my stories. I also do not write “novels” or “books”.

I write STORIES. Stories that have PEOPLE in them. I am not a writer, I am merely a STORYTELLER.

Some might say these are the same things. They are not. Not to me.

“Characters” are things like puppets that you as a writer control and push around inside of some maze-like novel you’ve dreamed up to hopefully entertain the reader. You’ve predetermined the plot; who’s going to be in it; even how it’s going to end.

That is not what I do. That would give me hives, actually.

The people in the story are the directors who lead where the story will go and I simply write what they say and what they do and I document the adventures they have. They are the ones telling their stories. All I’m doing is writing them down.

I don’t plan what happens. Not one piece of it.

Are you beginning to see where and how the magic happens?

“How very one-dimensional of you, Harley,” I can hear some of you critiquing.

Not at all. In fact, it makes for a much deeper development of the people in the story. I know, it sounds counter-intuitive, but that is what happens.

Image by deagreez1 via DepositPhotos

No ‘Driven’ Plots

Since I have no idea what the story is going to be about or where it is going, it is impossible for me to have a plot-driven story.

What this typically does is open up the story for me to have two, three, or as many as four or five sub-plots all running at the same time. Typically it’s three to four subplots, all of them intersecting at various points during the story and then wrapping up at the end in a tidy little epilogue.

I do not write “one-dimensional” stories.

Of course the next question is how do I keep track of where everyone is and what they are supposed to be doing? The answer is, I don’t. Keep track, that is. I don’t keep track because I don’t know where any of these subplots are going. They just kind of happen.

I know, it sounds totally like a trainwreck. I agree, it does.

But that is not actually what happens.

Somewhere in your fertile mind, there are creative juices flowing that indeed do steer the story in subconscious ways you, dear storyteller, have not imagined yet.

Shocking Plot Twists

In almost every story I tell, the people in the story astonish me with what happens. In most of my stories, at some point, someone does something that totally floors me. The people do something I did not plan and totally did not expect! Something that is not part of my personal character. Something so different that I cannot get the words onto the page fast enough.

I’m blown away.

The first time this happened was when I was writing Dominion. There are two heroines in the story who begin to get to know each other after one has lost her memory. Then suddenly, one of them reveals that they used to be an item and she steals a kiss from her friend.

Image by deagreez1 via DepositPhotos

Dominion was only my second novel. At this point in my writing career I had never written a same-sex romance story (and had not intended to). This story was intended to be (or so I thought) a paranormal spy-thriller straight HEA romance. Where the hell did this kiss come from? I hesitated even typing out the scene. I literally could not bring myself to write what the people in the story were doing, or wanting to do, to be precise. In fact, I stopped writing it and walked away to think about it.

What the hell?! I was thinking to myself.

But the more I thought about the story, the more I needed to know what was going to happen. I warred within myself. Do I write what needs to be written, meaning following the people in the story, or do I just write what I want to write? Meaning ‘drive’ the plot.

Hours later I would return to the story to finish following the scene; and from there I continued through to the very end with people who would become Hallmarks of the main Awakened series later on.

Yes, I could have “forced” or “dirven” the plot into something else. But that would not have been the real story that the people in the story were telling.

Dominion would become one of the best stories I think I have ever written. My wife and proofreader stayed up all night reading the book because she couldn’t put it down, the story was that riveting. She is a voracious reader of all kinds of novels.

Staying True to the Story

Incidentally, while my wife absolutely loved the story, she hated the same-sex “ship”. Mostly because the “kink”, if you will, was that the main heroine was also married to her love-interest’s brother. Yea, it was weird, but I didn’t plan this! It just happened that way as the story unfolded. And the kink, if you will, was not even remotely the point of the story, it was, if anything, a side note. All it did was add an interesting twist to the depth of the people in the story. It was something that could actually happen in real-life, and probably has, many times.

After the story was done, I began second-guessing myself. I even ripped out the same-sex “ship” because of my wife’s feedback. (Okay, I was a big argument that lasted days.) “No one is going to buy this!” she was adamant. But it weakened if not ruined the story without it. I love my wife very much, but in the end, I stayed true to the story, and myself as a storyteller and writer. I kept the “ship” and the story remains true to the rest of the series.

To this day, Dominion remains one of my all-time favorites, not because I caved to the “write to market” crowd, but because I remained true to the story and the people within it.

Image courtesy Harley Austin

Self-developing ‘Characters’

Again, I don’t like to use the term “characters” for stories because that is not what they are to me. It’s too plastic. To distant. I want to see and hear and feel the people in the story! Not just read about them.

I’m not the one telling the story either. They are. When you read a Harley Austin story, perhaps 80% to 90% of the copy will be dialogue; the interaction between the people is what unfolds the story. That dialogue is foundational and paramount to discovering who each of the people are and how they think and what they feel.

It is this dialogue where the depth of people in the story is made.

Too many authors, I think, write about “characters”. There’s a kind of narration that happens where the author tells me what someone is doing or thinking or who they want me to see a character as. To me that defeats the purpose of writing a story that rivets a reader to the page. That’s not how a Harley Austin story unfolds.

I want the reader to experience the feelings and even actions of the people in the story. Don’t just tell me what happens, lead me through the fight! Walk me through the despair. Involve me in the relationship. Don’t just tell me someone is “bad-ass”, let me see for myself why they are and what makes them that way.

By the middle of the story, I should almost know how someone is going to take or react to events going on around them. To me, writing stories this way helps me see and understand the people in the story much more deeply. More personally. Their complexities. Motivations. Weaknesses.

Image by deagreez1 via DepositPhotos

Writing the Unimaginable

Writing this way opens up plots I would never have dreamed of happening in a million years of just sitting down and trying to plan something out ahead of time.

The reason planning doesn’t really work that well, at least for me, is that when I am in the thick of the story and interactions between the people, [your] mind is seeing and hearing and feeling things that you are just never going to know about trying to plan from a 10,000-foot view.

Yes, you may encounter those things as you begin writing, but you’ve already planned out where the story is going — now what are you going to do? You’re stuck. Most writers will simply “drive” the plot and follow their original story plan. But now you’ve missed a deep and valuable opportunity to open the story up to go places you never in a million years would have imagined in some planning process!

Too much planning can cost you natural creativity and also forever cement your mistakes.

J.K. Rowling planned out almost every detail of Harry Potter, even showing her story outlines publicly to readers how she worked. However, one of the regrets Rowling said she had was planning the ending of Harry Potter. Everyone wanted Harry to get together with Hermoine; it just seemed so natural to the story. But instead, Rowling “planned” for Ron to get together with her. Rowling publicly admitted that this was a mistake, one she regrets making because she followed “the plan” and not the natural direction the story had taken.

The Neverending Story

Writing without using a plan, without being plot driven, has allowed me to create stories with people I would never have imagined myself writing.

Do I ever write myself into a corner? End up with huge plot holes I need to fix? Sure. Every author does that, even with the ones who plan. But that usually only happens when I’m asserting too much of my own conscious control over where the story is going and not just allowing it to naturally evolve.

Once the first draft of the story is complete, I set it aside for a couple of days to give my mind some time to rest and wander and just think about what was written. New ideas then often come to mind that I need to add to further develop some aspect of the people or the story; or fix something at the beginning because of other things that got added later.

It is at this point, the story now becomes my fully detailed outline that I can easily update, backfill, remove plot holes, or whatever, without destroying my creativity.

While to some writing this way seems haphazard or even foolish, it is one of the best methods a storyteller can use to fully engage their subconscious creativity to discover new people, new stories, and weave them into something brilliantly wonderful!

Harley Austin is an indie-author of over 25 published novels and serials on Amazon. He can be reached online at HarleyAustin.com.


Why I Don’t Do Story Outlines — Ever was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Author: Harley Austin