Drafts and Outlining

Why is it so important to draft and outline of a story? Even if it's non-fiction the writer needs to have a guide, a way that leads to completion. Any good story has a strong beginning, a good main body, and then a proper, if not climatic, ending.

But how does a writer achieve this? What does it take to make a truly great story? Besides the writing it takes practice. Anything you do takes practice. Drafting is essentially putting what you know into practice.

Take a moment and think about some of the drafts you've done over your life time, whether they were personal letters or stories. Drafting helps the writer see what is right and what is wrong with their piece of work. It is a way to establish what you want to say and how to say it even better next time. There is nothing wrong with creating several or many drafts of any one piece of writing, however there should be an end to it at some point. Obsessing over what could be and what needs to be are two personal struggles that every writer has. The objective is learning when to acknowledge that a work is finished in your eyes and is ready to be delivered to an editor or to the recipient.

Now let us think about outlining for a moment.

Outlining provides a very useful function. It is a way of finding the path that needs to be walked. This is where the beginning of an adventure is born. Outlining provides a visual for the writer and it depicts where the reader starts, where they will go, and where they will find an end. Think of it as a trail in a natural park. There are many ways the story could go but the writer takes the time to specifically plan out where the given path needs to lead. Along the way the trail has markers for things that must be seen or illustrated for the reader that comes along for the ride. Typically the writer wants to only add the most adherent details, things that are on a need to know basis. Other than that, let the story flow and naturally come across each event. The idea is not to force all of the story out when drawing up the outline, but to find the story's plot and conceptual ideas.

That's all for now. Thanks for joining me this week. Join me next week where I will be pondering the use of dialogue and its necessity in the fantasy genre.