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Why should you bother making an outline? Well, you don't have to. I mean, you can write from your heart from the start if you want to. I find that making an outline saves a lot of time. Some people falsely think that it’s going to stunt their creativity. I like to think of it more as that by setting these constraints and setting in motion the major building blocks of the story, I can get really creative inside of them, and usually people comment that my first draft looks more like a third or a fourth or a fifth draft, and I really credit that to the outlining process. So if you're thinking you just want to get started and you're driven by impatience, I just want to say whoa, the writing process is not actually about putting scenes on paper. It's not about writing lines of dialogue. That's just part of the process and really at least 70, maybe 80% of the work in the writing gets done up front. 

Okay, let me give you an analogy here. If they had sounded the Titanic correctly before it left the harbor, the ship may never have sunk. They’d have realized there was a problem with it. Do you want to wait until you see your giant iceberg and it's too late to turn the script away from it, or do you want to sound the script up front and figure out if there's things that you can elevate before you actually write the scenes? That's the joy of outlining to me. I mean, at some point, any writer, whether they just write from the seat of their pants up front or outline up front, is going to have to take that script back down to outline if they want to make it marketable. I figure why not try up front instead of buying a ticket to China and then realizing that I really wanted to go to Russia in the first place. At the end of the day your outline is more like a Google Maps to your story. It's a great way to get where you want to go, but if you want to turn off and deviate and take a detour, nobody’s stopping you. You’re not constrained to your outline, it just means that you have an idea of the path you’re heading down before you actually get down to writing scenes, and I find that exceedingly empowering. I find it really unlock my creativity and most of all, I find it saves me a lot of time.

I think that nobody really taught me the value of outlining, it's something that I found out on my own. I realized that as people responded to my scripts, they really had better things to say about them when I put the time in up front to really outline. Most of the classes I ever took focused on getting through an outlining process as fast as possible and getting straight to writing scenes, and maybe that works for some writers, like, you know, if that's your thing, go for it. One of the first books on screenwriting I picked up was Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! and, you know, this is well known by many, many screenwriters. Blake really introduced me to the idea of “story beats” that are common currency when you study at places like UCLA and USC, if you've gone through any kind of film school training. But most importantly, he taught me to go back into stories and to figure out what beats I wanted to write with, what beats resonated with me, and that's why you'll find that some of my beats correspond with the sort of standardized building blocks that Blake put in place, and then some of them are different, because I realized along the way that there were other points, tent pole moments in the story that could really help me. 

How did I come to this conclusion? Well, I read a lot, I interviewed a lot of screenwriters, I talked to a lot of teachers, I took a lot of classes, but most importantly I read a lot of scripts and I watched a lot of movies. I also worked through a lot of Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare's been a great love of mine for decades. There's probably no greater resource for a modern writer than Shakespearean theater. I mean, the characters all have very clear-cut but nuanced motivations and the story, although Shakespeare divides it into five specific acts, is really part of a three-point plot structure. It's really like Aristotle’s three acts. So since the beginning of time, people have been writing with these kinds of plot points. You can find them in classic theater. No modern teacher on writing has invented them. All we have done is describe something that was already there, and maybe my training in literature really helped me to look at how stories became successful from these tent pole moments that they put in place.

My number one tip for writing a successful outline is to have the guts to write more than one. You know, when it comes down to, for example, where you're going to begin your story, don't settle on your first idea. Don't get infatuated with this image you have in your head. Maybe you have discovered that image so that it can guide you towards the story, but maybe it'll never end up in your script. Hitchcock used to always say “kill your darlings” and I think that's really relevant for any writer. We have to be open to exploring many possibilities, and then settling for the best and nothing less. So I would say outline, outline again, be flexible, and there comes a point where once you have a general road map of where you're going, you just have to set it aside and then you can turn to the writing. This isn't about constraining yourself or shackling yourself to an outline or to a story design process, it's more like doing what it takes to be ready to write the story, and doing what it takes to be worthy of it. In most of my projects, I end up going what we call “off outline.” This means that I don't stay exactly on the beat sheet or on the building blocks outline that I've designed. I usually discover something new in the process of writing, but if I hadn't started with the outline, if I hadn't started working through these building blocks, would I have gotten there in the first place? That’s the real question. That’s why I do it. It's kind of like the mechanical process you go through in order to discover the real story that’s waiting for you.

© SJ Murray, 2018