Lifewriting Episode 11 "To Outline or Not to Outline..."

Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming back to join us one more time. Welcome to the Life Writing podcast, where married authors and screenwriters Stephen Barnes and.

Tananarive Du talk about writing during stressful times, breaking into Hollywood, and balancing life.

Every week, we'll share more tips on how to build a better life while you create your dream projects, even if.

It'S only one sentence a day. Life writing is the application of the tools of writing to life and the tools of life to your writing. All right, what are we talking about today, hun?

We're talking about, you know, there was a big Twitter kerfluffle. And I'm going to use the word kerfluffle because you don't get to use that word very often over outlining. And I thought, okay, let's get into it. Let's get into a conversation about outlining because this is something that all writers face at a certain point. Is the question to outline or not to outline?

Well, if they don't face the question, those are still the two major divisions. Some people just do what they do and they don't really think about what they're doing. This is all road trial stuff on the hero's journey. It's just the process that you're going through as you move towards your career. And in terms of the life writing pattern, this is, you know, if the first step is writing a sentence a day, this is the second step, which is writing one to four short stories a month, where you actually do have to start concerning yourself. So.

But first, I wanted to mention that we have an incredible guest lined up for next week's podcast. Do you want to say who it is? As someone you know better than I.

Do, it's my little brother, Rodney Barnes. We're not related, you know, brothers from other mothers. Rodney is just an amazing creative force right now. Just comic books, television, comedy, drama, film, Philadelphia.

Yeah, stand up.

I forgot.

He did stand up.

Well, he doesn't do it, but he, he writes jokes and works with people like Chris Rock. People like, oh, God, I forget. I forget who the other other people are.

Hey, that's enough.

Yeah, he's an amazing guy and I'm. I treasure his friendship and I know it's going to be the kind of conversation that's going to be hugely useful. So for a lot of you, you'll. This, you'll be hearing this after, you know, months from now. So I'll all say is you're definitely going to want, you know, the, the next podcast in the list. If you're listening to this one. Definitely get that one, too.

Yeah. A lot of you might know Rodney from his new show where he's a showrunner. It's on hbo Max, and it's called Winning Time, the Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

So I believe he's the executive producer on it, and he wrote or, you know, cooperatively wrote all but one of the episodes. So his. His taste, his. His voice is all over it. Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

No, go ahead.

I just wanted to mention that I have a college friend who's on that show, and I'm going to bring it up when we talk to Rodney. His name is Andy Hirsch, and he actually has a role on the show. And I'm so happy for him. So I'm happy for Rodney. I'm happy for my friend Andy. Tony. Just can't wait for next week.

You know, I have the Eightfold Path, the COVID of the graphic novel that I did with Charles Johnson up, up behind me right now, unfortunately, hopefully by the time we know when you watch this, it'll actually be in the stores. But I'm in this situation where, because of COVID it's been postponed. The publication has been postponed another month. I thought I would have copies in my hot little hands by now.

Your baby, you thought?

I know my baby. They keep pushing it back. I want to say this is. I get anxious, you know, when you put yourself out, when you care, when you're investing yourself in your work, you can't pretend not to care. I can't play it off. I do care. I want. I wanted to find a home. I want people to love it. When I'm working on it, I'm thinking about the people who might see it and appreciate and asking myself, what will help them? You know, what will make them laugh or cry or turn them on or scare them. That connection is important. And when you go through a situation like this, like we have right now with, you know, it hurts. And trying to deal with that anxiety. The only way I know how to deal with that anxiety is by burying myself in other work, you know, to just say, okay, you know, it's scary. You know, I'm going to get bad reviews or, you know, whatever, it's going to happen. But let me just focus on what's next. Let me just focus on what's next. That's what saves me. And also being able to put. Put the COVID in the background so that I can feel a little. A little less alone.

Well, congratulations to you on this blog. Thank you. Thank you. It was nothing.

It was Nothing. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

It's great. I can't wait for it to be out in the world. And speaking of keeping busy, I'm deep into a pilot revision that I am super inspired by. After getting some notes from a good friend and just opening up some, some doorways in my imagination that neither of us had thought of. That. That really helps motor it along. And I'm not going to give any details about this at all because I am at the point now where I do believe in jinxes. But we are very, very excited about some negotiations that are underway, some interest in another project. In another project. And I mean, it's almost like I'm pitching myself. And that's all I'm gonna say. That's all I'm gonna say.

There are probably gonna end up being three offers on this and two of them are like, just superb. It could go either way and be fine. So it's a situation where we're already happy and the only question is how happy are we going to be? So it's beautiful to be in that position when it happens. And undoubtedly, one of these days, as we go to the next step in this, we will document what it is that's happening. Leave that trail of breadcrumbs so that you have a clear understanding of the resources it's going to take to get you into Hollywood, to get you selling scripts or with your own show or a movie, or into the public publishing industry. You know, the, the route that we've left there is short story to novel to screenplay or whatever it is. But that first step, trying to organize your mind and your energy, God is killer. But one thing I wanted to say to you, t, is that I listened to you speaking to our friend about the specific insights that have excited you. And the way you were talking to him suggested to me that he was waking something up in your head that was always there. But it's, you know, the right mentor, the right teacher can, with just a five minute conversation, change your life. Well, your life. So it was. I don't think you're hallucinating. You really are in a different space about this.

It's, it's even. It was maybe, what, a 15 minute conversation. And even so I really did feel the sense that. And this is someone who's much more experienced than either of us in television, which is, which is part of it, obviously, but it was like they were shining a flashlight in a dark corner of my imagination. And then all of a sudden it.

Was like, oh, well, it's even better than that because they are so accomplished, we can actually watch episodes and of one of their flagship shows while reading the script. So that we can see, oh, this is how he described it. This how he structured. And this is what the art director and the cinematographer and so forth did with his verbal instructions to understand the connection between what's on the stage and what's on the page, you know, is. Well, this is why I wanted to do Danger Word. I wanted you.

That's our short film that came out.

Our short film as you can see it at www.DangerWord.com. i knew, first of all, I consider you to be a creative genius.

T consider you to be.

Darling, that's fine. I'm not putting myself down. I'm just saying how I see you, you know, it's. But I knew that until you had actually seen your words spoken by an actor, preferably being on the set so you can see what they're doing with it, how they're workshopping the language in order to find the subtext, so forth. I knew that until you actually saw that process. It's theoretical and it's different from writing dialogue in a book.

It was very empowering.

Yeah, it absolutely was. It absolutely was. So I. I guess that's to say for our listeners that you want to take these things into account. But I also wanted to get it on the record that my baby just made a leap. I believe in terms of her ability to do this. And what I said to her yesterday was, I want you to go deep, deep, deep, deep into this and teach me that you're going to learn things while you're doing this. I don't know, because I've not been in the position of our friend, nor do I have his specific skills. You're actually working on a project where you can apply those skills. So you're going to learn. And, you know, I will be. I will empty my cup and be a willing student to you when you're ready to teach me.

Well, like, you know, we spoke near the beginning of this podcast about how you came up with a great leap in structure that really got this ball rolling. But I can't wait for you to see what I've been doing with the feedback we got from our friend. So that will be very exciting and also very exciting. Exciting is that our podcast has reached a milestone. We got our first listener voicemail. Very exciting. Yes.

Are you set up to play it?

I am set up to play it.

Let's hear it.

And this is someone I had seen tweeting about it, but the tweets are private, so I couldn't retweet them. And they were kind enough. And in fact, any of you can do this. If you go to our podcast website, which is www.lifewritingpodcast.com, you will see instructions on how you can leave a voicemail. So this is the voicemail we got. It'll load up and play in just a moment.

Hey, Steve and Tananarive, this is Amy in Northern California just popping in to say how much I really, really am enjoying life Writing podcast. It is such a breath of fresh air.

The.

The. Both for its content, the way that Steve and Tananarive provide life examples for how to move in the world and how writing can be incorporated in your life and in how you feel about yourself and how you look at the world. It's fantastic. There's so much useful information, so much goodwill that just comes through your relationship with each other and your guests and your guest lists are all. Your guests are always really fantastic. I just am really thrilled. I'm so happy that you two came up with this concept and are delivering just so much useful and fun information. It's a really terrific podcast, and I'd be recommending it to everyone in my network. So just wanted to say thank you. We appreciate you. Keep going. Thank you.

I feel so.

I love. I love hearing that. It's. It's very similar to what I said about not getting, you know, not having the book published, that what you care about is how are people feeling about this?

Right.

You know, is it working for them? You know, we can say words, but if words don't create change on the other side, what's the point? I mean, I can talk to the greatest degree possible. These conversations are a lot like the conversations we just have sitting around the house.

True.

We're not. We're not putting it on in that.

Sense, or conversations we have had over many, many, many Facebook lives over the years. There was another platform called Talk Shoe where we used to do this radio, Internet radio. We have been trying to pass this information along for so many years, and I'm so glad that our message has met the moment of podcasting, because podcasting is such a great fit for us.

Yeah, I think so. You know, this is. You know, we're. We're working to build a career and working to have a family and to be healthy with each other physically, emotionally, but we're also looking to build a business. And in doing that, one of the things that we're doing is creating this podcast which enables us to communicate with you so that you have a sense of whether or not our approach to writing works for you. And if our approach to writing works for you, you're going to want to get find out more about it. So we're going to give you everything that we can here just because we love you. But then when you want a little bit more, that's what, you know, Life Writing Premium and things like that. Afrofuturism, you know, webinar.com and stuff like that, where you can get a little closer and a little bit more concentrated. But if you'll let us know what it is you want us to talk about it, we'll talk about it right here on this podcast every week. So all you have to do is leave us a voicemail and tell us what you want from us and you'll find us doing it.

Yes, absolutely. And just like today's talk was inspired by social media, just seeing the really heated exchanges going on between writers on this topic of outlining. And so to sort of set the stage for those of you who are not involved in the Twitter wars, we want to sort of reenact. We want to reenact the battlefront.

You want me to be nasty, huh?

Let's make mean face. So. And I will start one. I'll start with round one. Why I like what's called pantsing, and why I like just sort of making it up as I go. Pantsing and why I prefer to just make up my writing as I go. Some of you may not have heard of the term pantsing. I guess it's derived from flying by the seat of your pants. It's when you dive into a piece of work, fiction or whatever it is you're writing without any pre planning, just to see where your muse takes you. Your muse is your inner child, and the inner child likes to run free. That is your greatest creative space. I spend all day in structure. I spend all day in meetings, taking calls, meeting deadlines. When I'm working on my. My heart space, which is my fiction, I want to be liberated. I don't want to be constrained by any rules. I want to end. In fact, what if I write an outline and it turns out it just would have been better if I made it up and let the characters show me what the story is instead of telling them what to do? Pantsing is the only way to go. All right, you take it away.

Okay. Ding, ding. All right. So speaks the amateur Professionals understand that their time is worth money. They understand that. They have to. If I've got six weeks to turn in a script, I don't have that. I don't have the time to write it, find out that it's crap or not what I wanted to do, and start over again. Every day I see people complaining that they don't know what the end of their story is. You know, they just started writing because they were in a white heat. They got this great idea, but they don't know how to end it. So they end up writing a book, and they get to the last third of the book, and it's like, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I don't know where I'm going. The characters led me astray. The characters took me off the path. Yeah, it's like that. It's like that. So what you do, what a mature adult does, is if your kid keeps running out into the road and almost getting hit by truck, you can't just respect what the kid wants to do. You have to fence off your yard. You have to create a safe space for the kid to play. And that's what your outline is before you start writing. You know, oh, is this a story? You take the hero's journey, for instance, and you say, okay, is there a character? Do they want something? Are they prepared to move forward? Do I understand the kinds of things that they're going to do? Maybe come up with three examples of the kinds of things they do? What do they learn? Who do they meet? What is the biggest point of problem? How do they solve the problem in a way that allows them to grow as a person or to demonstrate some quality about them that is important to do? And then do I show them moving to the next level in their lives or. Or if they fail, show them dropping back? If I can have that, it might be no more than a paragraph or two to create an outline or a page or a few pages, depending on the length of the project. But to deny structure is like having a body with no bones. It's like, well, there are people who can do that. Stephen King talks about just. He's a pantser. He sits down and he can just do it. And that is such an advanced level of the game that unless you are 100% certain. No, you're. You're likely letting your ego, you know, you don't. Don't let your ego get your butt in trouble. That's all. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. Amateur.

Okay, well, the funny Part about this, I mean, full disclosure, I'm not a panther. I mean, the only time I don't outline is when I'm writing short stories, say. And that is the one time I will indulge the part of myself that does just sort of want to discover the story. But even so, I have to admit, since short stories often are not the top priority in my writing life, I have paid projects or I have pitches I'm doing and I have to walk away for a week, sometimes 10 days, I will write notes to myself about what is even supposed to happen. I have literally gone back to stories that I started. Like, I have a great first page, and then I don't remember what I was going to do after that. So even with short stories, it can sometimes be a good idea to do a little bit of outlining. But I will say this. I understand and appreciate you as writers who feel overly stressed by the. Even the very idea of an outline. It dampens your spirit, it puts out your fire. It makes writing feel more like work to you, and you don't mind going through three, four, five drafts to kind of find the story. And that's what writing feels like to you. Listen, if it works, if you're. If you're creating publishable work or work that your reading group or your beta readers say is excellent work, then I can't argue with you and say it's not working. But what we're going to talk about today on the POD is the benefits of outlining.

Well, I think that we can talk about the benefits of either. I don't want to come down on one side or the other, because all that matters is what it is that you said. Are you getting the work done? You know, if you're on the life writing path and we want you to be writing one to four short stories a month, are you finishing that story? If you're finishing it, then you might ask yourself, are you enjoying the process? You know, because sometimes there are people who only enjoy. They don't enjoy writing, but they enjoy having written. And I'm not going to. Those are. Those are writers, too. You know, everybody has their own way of doing it. But what matters the most if what you're trying to do is be a writer, be an author. To be published, let's say, is to finish the work, submit the work, and constantly improve your work as well as improving your understanding of the field. So if you're a pantser and you just want to sit down and write and you look up after a month and you've You've written two stories. Fantastic. You found your way.

It's working.

If you have not done those two stories or you're feeling like you could have used a little help, a little support, a little bit more structure, are you feeling like you're a little lost in terms of, you know, it could have been easier, or you're not sure how to improve your work, then you might want to try planning in advance. And if you plan in advance and there isn't as much fun, or you're afraid that if you plan in advance it's not going to be fun, then one of the things that is important to understand is I can create an outline. And in the process of writing, I am getting to know my characters, the world, the. The situation, so things can change. But I start a story knowing that you know something. If it ends this way, that'll be a good story. I can always trade up. You know, if a character wants to do something funnier, faster, better, sexier, deadlier, then I'd ask, well, how's that going to affect the rest of the story? And if I can see, like a row of dominoes and say, okay, this could affect this this way, I might need to make some changes, but that is also leading to a good conclusion, maybe even a better conclusion than I am pantsing inside the structure of plotting or from the other way I am plotting in order to create a safe space within which I can just write what the heck I feel like writing on any given day when I'm writing, especially if I'm doing the process that I use of going from script, you know, from outline or treatment to script to prosecution, that when I'm just writing script, I have no idea what these people are going to say. I might have a loose idea of what I want to happen inside a scene. You know, that in this scene, these people are walking from here, over there, and they're going to see something at some point that I need to call some attention to because it's going to end up being a clue 50 pages down the road. So let me write this. You know, what are they talking about? How can I indicate this clue? It's a gum wrapper, you know, for Mex, for some brand of gum that isn't sold in the United States, which tells them that there's a Mexican hitman who chews this gum, you know, because they, you know, whatever, whatever it is you're going to do, whatever it is that you're thinking, you don't know what you're going to come up with while you're doing it. But if you have a structure that, you know, if you executed this, it's going to be okay. There is a tremendous amount of confidence in there. You then combine that with the understanding that your first drafts are going to be crap. Don't even worry about your first draft now. You do things a little differently there. That's the. That's the question of, do you just write straight through to the end, or do you fix it as you go? That's probably another conversation.

That's another conversation.

Another conversation.

I'm a buffer and a polisher. I don't move on until I think that page is. Is done. Done.

And that is, you know, and it works beautifully. Well, the important thing is that whatever process you're using, does it get the results you want? If it does, God bless you. If it doesn't, change it up.

So I would like to take a moment to explain some terms for those of you who are like, well, what do you mean when you say outlining? Right. The most basic form of an outline is something called a beat sheet. A beat sheet is something I learned about when I started screenwriting, and it's basically bullet points. This happens. This happens. This happens. It doesn't have a whole lot more than that. If I were writing a beat sheet for get out, for example, I'll use that as an example, because y' all should have seen it by now. Okay, so the first beat is a black man is lost in a suburban neighborhood and gets abducted. Boom. A white woman is shopping for pastries for breakfast. She goes to her boyfriend. They're about to visit her parents. He says, do they know I'm black? Now, often in a beat sheet, you don't include dialogue, but obviously dialogue like, do they know I'm black? Is very central to the whole idea of this movie. So in that case, yeah, you could just say, he asked if her parents know he's black. But you can also write that as dialogue. And then on the road, they hit a deer. The police officer asked for his ID for no reason. When they get to the house, the parents are very welcoming. You see what I'm doing with this? It's just this happens. This. There's no.

That last beat is the parents are too welcoming.

Yeah, Right.

They're too bending over backwards to make him comfortable to the point that he feels uncomfortable.

Yeah, good point. So that is a beat sheet, and it's literally. You can write it as bullet points. Points. And what I would call an outline is when you take Those bullet points out and you say just a little bit more about every single one of those beats, like, especially the significance of the scene. Like, why is this scene in the story for you, you know, now?

So if you take a look at like, you know, I, I tend to use the hero's journey and you say this is where the character is going to start at the beginning. This is where they're going to get to at the end. What is it that needs to happen along the way so that whatever the climax of the story is will have the maximum emotional impact on the reader or the, or the viewer. That means that suggests other scenes. They have to learn this, they have to have this. They have to be these obstacles. You have to raise the stakes so that people can feel how hard they've worked to get there. So that by the time they get there, we feel like it's great victory at great price. If you take a look at any movie that is successful on kind of a. I don't want to say trivial way, but let's say any Marvel movie. Marvel movies are not great art. They are great craft. They are great craft and they really understand how to structure to create an audience payoff. Even if you don't want to write Marvel movies, it would be really useful to understand that they set up things at the beginning, they get paid off at the end. They just, they just do this to watch a couple of those movies and write down what's happening in this scene. What's happening in this scene, if you will do that. Or you could start with a Twilight Zone episode. You know, go on. You can get that stuff on, on YouTube. You can get it on cable because the half hour Twilight Zone episodes, many of them were perfect little short stories. And you can watch them and write down what's happening in this scene. What do you think it means? What do you think it means? If you can read that outline and it's no more than a page or even less so this happens, this happens, this happens. And is that the basics that you need to have the irony and the payoff or the fear or the twist work at the end? If not, you work with its bones. After you've done this enough times, a master craftsperson will have all this and unconscious competence. Sonatanarive can write short stories without knowing where it's going because she has a level of experience that if she does that, it works out. She. It's not just. Well, it's not just that you know stories. It's that you understand your process, that you trust Your process. And so you can afford to have fun writing a short story because most of the time you actually do get there. When was the last time you started a story that you couldn't finish?

It's been maybe three years. Yeah.

And so instead, how many stories have you written since then?

Probably four or five.

Yeah. You know, so basically the idea is that she knows that in, you know, 15, only 15% of the time, you know, or 20% of the time, maximum, is it not going to work out and you're having fun and you're also exploring yourself. So it's absolutely worth the investment of your time and energy to do it in the way that's the most fun. 80% of the time it's, it works out anyway. So why not.

To expand on my definitions, there's also been a treatment which usually you hear spoken of in Hollywood, television and film and a treatment really is a fancy name for an outline. But I guess I would say generally speaking they are longer and more detailed. Just for an example, a few years ago, by a few, I mean many, many years ago, Steve and I were pitching my novel the Good House. We got it set up at what was called Fox Searchlight at the time. Based. And we were pitching based a mini treatment. We basically told them the movie, the whole movie, beginning to end. And it was so detailed that we were able to write that script in only two weeks because it was probably about 15 to 18 pages. I would guess was.

Could be. Yeah, I mean it was, you know, the, what Robert McKee, St. Robert says is that if you create your treatment properly and sometimes treatments are longer than scripts because they have notes in them and research in them and you just, you know, you just do it until, until you've got everything that you need to know about that world but you haven't written any dialogue or very, very sparingly that you write that treatment until you're ready to burst, until those characters are dying to talk to you. Now that's, that's plotting taken to an extreme. So most people, you know, I. What other things that I do for plotting is I write story elements on index cards, on scan cards, on post it notes. I use, use massive, massive, you know, pads of paper. I use whiteboards or blackboards. And you, you, every time you create an outline of something and use a different medium, the story looks a little differently. That every time you can take the same information and put it into a different form. This time it's on an outline on Google. This time it's a stack of index Cards that you're carrying around in your pocket. This time it's, it's, you know, the scan card system, which I love. This time it's post it notes that you're sticking up on your wall. Every time you take the same information and put it into a different form, you learn something new about the project and you learn it relatively painlessly. It's that painless thing that I really like. It's the low hanging fruit. I will just every day I'll just do the stuff that's easy that day and I then trust my unconscious mind to take me further into the project. So the next day, new things are easy. Things that were hard previous day, it was hard on Monday, it's easy on Wednesday.

That's a good way to address the, this issue of boredom constraining your inner child to rules like people who want to feel liberated. If you need to use color coded index cards, pretty and fun, we'll do that. You know, you can maybe trick your inner child into outlining if you need to. Trick your muse into outlining if you need to. But I, you know, I'd like to talk about some of the biggest reasons that Steve is holding up some of his colorful index cards right now.

That's right. You know, we're not joking about this stuff. This is what we actually do. We actually use this every day. We're talking about the stuff that we use every day.

So there are a lot of good reasons to learn outlining. I taught in Antioch University, Los Angeles MFA program for maybe more than 10 years. And I've taught at Vona Voices of our Nations. And one thing I always tell my students, learning writers is that it's a good idea to at least practice outlining. Even if you don't think you're going to continue to outline. It's just a good skill to have in your back pocket. And there are some practical reasons for it that have nothing to do with your own creative process, or at least not directly. Because listen, if you've ever tried to get someone to read a whole script or God forbid, a whole novel, you know how tough it is to get really, really good insight from readers to find that person who has both the skill and the time to turn around meaningful notes. Well, guess what? If you write a detailed outline which is 15 or 20 pages, it is a lot easier to get someone to read that. And they can tell you without you having to write 200 pages into it that, oh, you know, that second act was really saggy. There wasn't enough incident it really felt like you were treading water. You need more of an obstacle. You need everything else looks great. But that second act, I was bored.

And you know my thing that once again, from St. Robert McKee. I like outlines that are three pages long to force myself to squeeze down everything I think I know about, about a story to just three pages. First act, second act, third act, maybe four pages maximum, you know, with a mid act climax to see does the story work? Does it work in that condensed form? If it does, then once again, you know, there's nothing that's sad. And somebody talks about having worked on a book for a couple years and can't come up with an end, you know that they. If you look, if you can't create an outline, you might try what Margaret Mitchell did with Gone with the Wind. She wrote the last chapter first and then she wrote up to that chapter. That is, I think, you know, that's pretty brilliant way of doing it. But know where you're going. Otherwise it could be like getting in your car and you don't know where you're going, but you hope you're going to end up someplace interesting. No. Don't you have a destination or a restaurant you want to go to or you want to go to Disneyland or a movie theater or something? You're not just driving in a circle. If you want to just drive in a circle and it's your experience that that works out for you, then fine, do it. But otherwise be careful.

Yes.

A real practical suggestion. Didn't you?

Well, I, I just want to appeal to the practical side of your mind for a moment. For example, those of you who write non fiction, guess what? In nonfiction, you can actually sell a whole book based on an outline and maybe a couple chapters, two or three chapters. I know this because I have done it. Okay. Same thing is true in fiction sometimes if you're an established writer. I don't know many houses that are going to take a chance on an unestablished writer just based on an outline.

No, I said three chapters in an outline is the standard comment.

Really?

Three chapters in an outline is the standard? Now that may have. No, it's not new, it's old. Whether or not it may conceivably have become out of date. But that was the standard advice 40 years ago.

Oh yeah. I don't think when I started publishing it was even. I had to have published a couple books with an editor before they were willing to give me an advance based on an outline and a few chapters. So it may vary And I don't know what the. But I do know in nonfiction, at least, it was the norm. And I think it's a little bit easier because what you're selling in nonfiction is not so much your writing ability, which is very true often in novels, but the subject matter you're writing about, very well versed in that subject, and your. Your writing, you know, is fine. You might be able to get that contract.

You know, if the outline is solid and the three chapters are solid, I think you can see whether or not a person has writing ability. What you don't know is whether they have the ability to finish a book.

Well, that's. See, that's another reason I would say double check with your writing group, see what people are encountering. It took me a while before I could sell a novel based on an outline. Some of you were like, huh, you didn't even know that was a thing, Right? So, of course, not only does it pay to know how to write an outline, but how to write a detailed outline. My book, I guess it was Blood Colony, which is the third book in my African Immortal series. That was when I had established a relationship with my editor, who was Malika Darrow. And based on what her buyer, her committee was saying was, yeah, we can buy it based on an outline, but it needed to be in a detailed outline. I think the outline was 30 pages long. Okay. So I was envisioning that story from beginning to end. She could tell I knew exactly where it was going. And in the case of that book, I did follow it pretty strongly. Another example would be the Good House, which I did not sell based on an outline, but I wrote one for myself. And once I started writing that book, I almost never looked at the outline again. So sometimes an outline is literally the template, and another time, it's just to set you on the path toward completing your project.

Once again, what matters is what's happening with your work. Are you getting the results that you want? That's where the rubber meets the road. The rest of it is theory, and it's, I think this will work. I think this will work. If your intent is to finish the work, then be sure that whatever you're doing enables you to finish the work. If your intent is to be a professional writer, be sure that you're writing material that can get published. If your intent is just to have fun and express yourself, then do whatever it is that you want to do. But don't get yourself trapped into thinking that one or the other way. Is it. What is it? Is what works for you?

I'll give you an exam, another example from a novel project. And then I want us to talk about Hollywood because that's a, in my view, very different animal in terms of outlining. I have a novel coming out next year, I hear. I thought it was coming out this year, but like you, Steve, I am, I am having a delay now. I have a novel coming out next year called the Reformatory. And it was a very difficult project for me. It's based on the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, where I had a great uncle who died there in 1937. So it's a very research heavy novel. I decided to set it in 1950 since I know that era a bit better from my parents. But it was a seven year process in part because when I first started writing it, I don't think I did outline it. I just, I had very strong feelings about why I was writing the book. I wanted to both expose the violence and horrible things that happen at this place. And I wanted to give the character based on my great uncle a different ending. Right. So I knew the ending and I fooled myself into thinking that knowing the ending was enough. But as I kept running into barriers along the way, what feels like writer's block, which I don't really believe in, writer's block sometimes is a lack of research. But also writer's block is literally just an emotional block to your project and period. It's not that you can't think of the words, it's that you don't want to engage with it. And in my case, we're going to.

Need to do a show specifically on writer's block, right?

We should, we should do knocking out writer's block. But I finally realized that I was lying to myself about my forward progress on the novel. I was not making enough. I got to a certain point where I ran out of just pure imagination. And I really needed to know what was going to happen next. Right. So I used our life writing principle, and this is absolutely true of A sentence a day. Instead of writing a sentence a day on the actual novel, I made myself write a sentence a day on what do you think? Outline my outline. Absolutely. And in doing that, guess what? It forced me to let go of my BS to engage with the work and actually ask myself, what do you think is going to happen next? And it was immensely helpful when my wagon wheels were stuck in the mud, as they were now. Over those seven years, I was also learning screenwriting and we were raising our sons. So it's not like I wasn't doing any writing. I was doing a lot of writing. I just wasn't doing enough writing on that project.

Right.

Can we talk about Hollywood?

Yeah, let's do that. Now, you know, in Hollywood, if you're not going to write a spec project, in other words, if you're writing a spec script, you could conceivably write a spec script as a panther. I would still suggest that you outline because that process of going from, you know, an idea to a stack of index cards to a few pages to three pages to 30 pages, and then you just turn that 30 page outline into a script. That process is very well understood and it is used by countless professionals to get their best work every single time.

Tell them when the spec script is. Honey, some people may not.

Spec script is a script script that you write without anybody having given you any money for it.

Right.

You take out a whole script, you wrote it on, you know, speculatively, you know, that you weren't paid to write it. You're writing it to either explore an idea or to have a sample, a work sample that you're going to show to somebody. You get that spec script, you send it to an agent, you go, you, you write the Writers Guild of America. Ask them, you know, give me a list of agents who are willing to take a look at spec scripts from unpublished, unprepared produced authors, unproduced screenwriters. They'll give you that list. You send your spec script in and sometimes somebody will say, hey, this isn't bad, and they'll engage with you and send it out to TV shows or whatever. So.

And it can also be a writing sample to get a job writing for a TV show.

Yeah. Usually though, if you're going to do that, you don't write a spec script for that show. The advice is you write a spec script for another show and then you send it. Because there's are ins and outs to the shows that you don't understand. You don't accidentally step on somebody's last nerve. But if, you know, they also, they often can't, they can't afford to look at a script for their show because they're afraid of getting sued.

True.

People are very litigious.

True, true.

So that's one thing is the spec script. But if you're going to sell in Hollywood and you don't have a completed script, in all likelihood you're going to go from a pitch, you know, to walk into a television office, you know, and say, okay, you know, this week I think that this is what these characters will do. And it would be this, this, this, this, and this. And they might, you know, talk to you about. They might love your idea. And if they love your idea, sometimes they want you to give them every single thing that happens in that episode. Other times they will buy your idea and say, you know, okay, flesh that.

Out, or even give me a page and a half.

That's right, give me a page and a half. Sometimes they will pay for that page and a half, but a lot of times they'll say, go away and come back with a page and a half. And if you do that, then they're not going to give you that money unless they know that you've at least got a story that can work. And you're going to. You're going to present that story in a professional way, which is basically you're. You're telling them once upon a time, and you say that, you know, the characters do this and they do this. It's almost as if you were describing that episode that you saw last night on television to a friend.

And I don't want to rewind back to something very, very important that you said. Sometimes they pay you. Very often they pay you, literally. An outline is a part of the deal that your agents are going to negotiate with you. Sometimes it is worth tens of thousands of dollars to write one and a half to three pages. So does that get your attention?

If this is the whole thing about Hollywood, there is an obscene amount of money running around in Hollywood. The difficulty is positioning yourself where you can get it and developing the skills so that when the opportunity arises, you're ready. So working on outlines, learning the skill of outlining, could save your butt.

Absolutely.

If you ever get that chance, there's.

No reason not to learn it, especially if you have any aspirations to work in Hollywood. One of the things that happened during the Twitter wars over this was people were chiming in with things like, I'd love to jump into this debate about outlining, but I'm too busy writing this outline for money. You know, the working screenwriters, whether they're feature writers or television writers, were resoundingly telling people, you need to learn how to do this. Your showrunner will expect you to know how to do this. The executives will expect you to know how to do this. So it's just another skill to have. Whether you use it in your personal work or not, it's a professional level skill that can help you leapfrog ahead in the industry.

So it's not contrary to my snide comment at the beginning. It's not amateur as opposed professional as opposed to amateur. It's professional as opposed to the artiste, the person who is, who simply wants everybody to bow at their genius. Trust me, I'll do it. It's going to be brilliant. You don't do that. There are a thousand other people just like you who think they're just as smart as you are. What they care about is what can you demonstrate. And a three page outline or a one page pitch or a 30 page outline is what shows them that you can think in terms that they can turn into an actual television show, an actual movie. That's when their checkbook opens.

Absolutely. It's just such an important thing to know.

It is. It's a critical thing to know. These are all, you know, we're talking about how to organize your skills. So these are, these are meta skills. These are skills of being a professional. The other skills that you need are the skills of being a writer. In other words, how do you actually write a story? How do you actually keep yourself on track? You know, I always figure that you're 100 stories at the maximum, you're 100 stories away from publication. Most people who've been writing some stories are no more than 10 or 15 stories away from publication if they're guided properly. And that can lead into Hollywood. Most people I know in Hollywood who have, who have had scripts produced, they say they had one to two feet of scripts, a pile one or two feet high. So that's, that's what, 10 scripts, 20 scripts? Something like that? It's a lot. But how hard are you willing to work? You know, you look at, you know, people making, you know, a million dollars a script, stuff like this, you think that's easy? You think you don't have to be a professional. You think you can get there because you just knew how to do it? No, you need to break it down to component pieces. Practice the component pieces until you've got them in unconscious competence and move on. And that's why we recommend Life Writing Premium.

Yeah. Because our Life Writing Premium course really does delve into these questions of both craft and emotions. Right. Because as I described with the reformatory, what was holding me back from even letting myself imagine what might happen next was purely emotional. It didn't have anything to do with my skills as a writer, my imagination. Sometimes we're stuck because like a character in one of our stories, we are, you know, having a dark night of the soul. We're not believing in ourselves. We're not believing we have the talent. We don't think we really can pull off writing a whole novel. Even though you may be 50, 60, 70 pages in, you don't even want to ask yourself the question, huh? What would it look like if I tried to write an outline? Because I think sometimes we're afraid it will look like a disaster. Right? It will look like a disaster. So part of what Life Writing Premium does is not only craft advice, but it is life advice. The life of the writer. How to create a writer's life that will support your work while creating work that will support your writer's life.

The most basic level is you just commit to writing a sentence a day and to watching. You know that the video that we send you every week, the more advanced is when you're actually getting into doing that one to four stories. But if you spend a year writing a sentence a day and watching all those videos, I can guarantee you that the writer part of you is going to feel so nurtured that that one sentence a day is going to blossom. By the time you've been doing that for a month, it's going to blossom into a paragraph or a page, and you're going to be. You're going to be in that and you will start understanding what it is that we're saying, that the writer part of you is not the same as the part of you that has all the doubts and the fears. It's the part of you that dreams. It's a part of you that remembers being a kid. I have such respect and affection for that part of you because I've still got that kid place inside me, and that kid inside me has accomplished so much, and he wants playmates. So. Tonari. One of the biggest things about my relationship with Tonata Reeve is we're playmates.

Absolutely. Our kids play together all the time.

Absolutely. So, you know, you. Hopefully you're going to be the next member of our playmate gang, and we're going to be able to talk about stories and we'll be able to read your story and analyze it. Life writing style. If you're a member of Life Writing Premium, we, you know, we no longer analyze other people's stories at any price. If we did, we'd have to charge over a thousand dollars dollars a story. But what we can do is have our. The members of our community submit stories to us and we can choose a couple of them and then analyze them. So that works out really well.

Yes, had one. It was fantastic. And it was.

It was just great.

Everybody felt good about it. So check out www.lifewritingpremium.com. we hope you have enjoyed this conversation that is all about outlining. And no matter which you choose, just try outlining. Just if you've never done it especially, or if you've done it and you felt like you were a terrible failure at it, practice it a little bit. You might surprise yourself.

And if you are a compulsive outliner, try to sitting down and pantsing. Just seeing what happens on a very, very short story. Just see what happens. Just because you should be familiar with the yin and the yang of this. Yes, sweetie, I think that's it for today.

The hero or heroine of your own story. Thank you, everybody. Join us next week when we will have Rodney Barnes. And we'll see you next time on the Life Writing Podcast. Bye bye.

Bye. Bye.