Hic Sunt Dracones #1: A necessary pain
Christ is among us!
‘Hic Sunt Dracones’ is my series for personal fiction writing projects. I’ve got several different things I’m working on, at varying degrees of intensity. Expect this series to include drabbles, thoughts, a healthy dose of self-critique, and observations on my creative process.
Saturday the 4th of November, The Year of Our Lord 2023, A.U.C. 2776
I dearly wish I did not need to outline. Many writers do not after all, or so I have heard. These lucky souls can simply sit down with a pen and paper or a keyboard and simply move words directly from mind to medium. I am not so fortunate. I learned in High School that I write much better essays when I begin by listing the points I will write about. Frequently the finished product does not resemble this outline too closely, but it is neccesary nonetheless. The few papers I started without outlines ended up being my worst ones, both in argumentation and in style.
My fiction writing inherits this quality. The few stories I have finished, short though they are, were only posisble because I wrote a fairly detailed outline at the start. From this neccesity a problem arises: As my ambitions point me towards longer and longer stories, a neccesity arises for longer and longer outlines. Long outlines take a great deal of thought and time to construct, and I cannot help but feel that said time and thought would be better served in actually writing!
The fallacy is obvious of course. My writing suffers, both in quantity and quality, without an outline. If my goal is to write the best quality work, I should outline, and understand that I will be less prolific than authors like Steven King. Perhaps I should be grateful for that. The quality of contemporary fiction is worryingly bad.
I am taking steps to reduce my reliance on outlines, at least a little bit. Most of my posts for this blog, including this one, have been written with no or very little outlining. I intend to continue that trend as long as possible. One of the reasons I started this blog was to practice writing quickly, and that has evolved to include writing without an outline. My hope is that this will eventually build a skill for writing spontaneously, which will then be transferrable into the realms of fiction and essay-writing.
Ciao ciao for now