To Outline, or Not to Outline? How Jasmine Guillory Prepares Her Writing

Sometimes when looking at writing advice, it seems like there’s One True Way to be a writer, and that if you just take the advice of the person who argues their case well enough, you’ll crack the code and get there. I’m here to tell you that, as much as it can seem like it, there’s no one way to be a writer. Writers come in all sorts of styles, previous professions, attitudes towards writing, and everything you can think of. What’s most important, especially when starting out, is that you try out different ways of writing and see what works best for you. And I think one of the ways that’s the most essential is for the question that everyone asks: do you outline?

I was a history major in college, but long before that, I was a serious outline devotee. I think I used an outline for everything major I ever wrote throughout my many years of school, and continuing on to my legal practice. So when I decided to write a novel, it seemed like second nature to me to outline. But after I finished that (unpublished) novel, I read so much writing advice that had the general message that outlines were for suckers. Real writers could just have an IDEA, and then sit down and the words would FLOW. My first book was getting a bunch of rejections, and I had another idea, so I thought, okay, I’ll just try to start with that and see what happens!

Here’s what happened: I wrote the first half of that book three times, and finally abandoned it. The problem was that my idea only lasted me through the first quarter or so of the book, and I had no idea what could or should happen in the middle. I had a beginning, and a vague idea for an end, but I didn’t know what else should be there, so I kept trying and failing to come up with something as I wrote. Maybe, I thought, I’m just not a real writer.

But then, a while later, I had another idea, about a man and a woman who get stuck in an elevator together, and by the time the elevator started working again, he’s convinced her to be his date to a wedding. I liked my idea a lot, and I knew I wanted to try to write this book, so I decided to try what had worked for me in the past: an outline. My outline wasn’t very long to start with — maybe ten key scenes I knew I wanted in there — including what happened in the middle of the book — and then random notes about who I thought these two people might be and why they would have gotten themselves into this situation in the first place.

As I kept writing, I kept adding to my outline as I went along. I gave myself a path to follow to get through the first quarter, then the first half, then the first two thirds, and finally through the end of the first draft of the book. I took many steps off the path as I wrote, as I figured out the characters, as they became real people to me, as I realized that things I had come up with initially in my outline wouldn’t work for Alexa and Drew. But I knew I needed something written down to tell me what to do when I was stuck and thinking “Oh God, what comes next?” especially when I was in that difficult middle part of the book where the end felt so far away. My outline got me to finish The Wedding Date, my debut novel, and I haven’t attempted to write a book without an outline since.

This is not to tell you that you need an outline to get a book published; it’s to say that I know I need an outline to get a book published. And it’s especially to say that at this point in my writing career, I’m so glad I tried to write without an outline and failed miserably, because now I know what works for me and what doesn’t. Try writing with and without an outline, try writing at different times of day, try all sorts of writing advice you see out there. Be ready to fail, be thrilled to succeed. What’s most important is getting to know yourself as a writer, and what works best for you.