There Are Outlines, and Then There Are Outlines
Many excellent works are available about how to write, but there is one category of writing that even topflight professionals struggle with, and that's outlines. I have seldom seen outlines covered adequately in the how-to literature I've read, probably because most writers who write about writing have never seriously examined why we need outlines. If you think we need them only to help us write books, you're probably doing something wrong.
Too many writers dismiss outlines as unworthy of serious attention, or not essential to the practice of their trade. "I'm a good writer, but a lousy outliner," I frequently hear, and the statement often sounds like a boast. "What does it matter?" goes another typical remark. "My finished books don't resemble my outlines anyway, so why bother?" Still others say, "The outline is in my head, and as long as my books turn out well, why should I have to outline them on paper?"
These scoffers have failed to understand the critical truth about outline writing: publishers are less interested in what's going into your book than they are in what's going onto your cover.
From what I know about publishing history, the use of outlines to sell books to publishers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before World War II, it was de rigueur for authors to submit completed manuscripts to their publishers. Even established authors wrote their books before seeking contracts with their regular publishers. They might consult with them in the formative stages, but it was pretty much taken for granted that the author knew what he was doing and where he was going with his book, and that editors served to help shape or tidy up the finished product. The purpose of outlines was, as you might expect, to help authors conceptualize and develop their books. It didn't matter if the outlines were long or short, well written or scribbled, highly compressed or elaborate (Henry James composed forty thousand word summaries of his later novels, declaring the process "The divine principle of the scenario"): an outline was a working sketch for the sole use of the author. It was not designed for display, particularly to publishers.
After World War II, the nature of publishing changed dramatically, affecting not only what kinds of books were written but how they got sold. Not the least of the transformations was that of the outline from writing tool to selling tool.
With the emergence of publishing as big business, with the acquisition of publishing companies by conglomerates or their absorption into immense entertainment complexes, a schism was created between the editorial and the business functions. Tremendous tensions were created as publishers demanded better justification for the purchasing of books. Profit-and-loss statements and market projections had to be drawn up before submissions were accepted. Editorial and publishing committees replaced the judgments of individual editors whose rationales for acquisition were often no more than intuition, enthusiasm, or personal pleasure.
In order to crack this increasingly formidable system, authors were required to produce detailed and polished presentations that answered not merely the question "What is it about?" but such questions as "How does it differ from similar books?" "What is the target market and how large is it?" and "Can a publisher make a profit on it?" It no longer mattered if an individual editor was wild about a book or a proposed book, because he was no longer the only person making the decision. Indeed, many of the people now making the decision might not have read the work at all, and not a few of them weren't particularly interested in books except in terms of their bottom line value as merchandise: how to "package" them, how to position advertising and promotion for them, how to price them, how to "move" them. Some writers realized that in order to satisfy this growing cadre of specialists, they'd have to learn a kind of writing very far from the sort of thing they'd been doing until then—not synopses but sales pitches cunningly contrived to subdue the anxieties of publishing personnel ranging from art director to head of sales to subsidiary rights director to publicity chief to vice-president in charge of marketing to editor.
If you piled all the outlines I have read in my lifetime on top of each other, they would reach the summit of Kanchenjunga. So I can say with some authority that few writers have grasped this crucial distinction between outlines designed to guide oneself through the complex terrain of plot and character and those written to turn on the staff of a publishing company. All too often I see chapter-by-chapter outlines of fifty or a hundred pages describing every twist of story and every nuance of character development, outlines that are 95 percent longer than most editors have the time or inclination to read, and that are deficient in many elements that are tempting to potential buyers. Such outlines should go back where they belong: beside the author's typewriter, helping him construct his book. But they don't belong on an editor's desk.
Let's look at the components of a solid outline. Naturally, we have to divide proposals into two categories: those for nonfiction books and those for novels.
Nonfiction books are both easier to outline and easier to sell from an outline. A nonfiction work lends itself to easy encapsulation because its subject is finite and usually defines itself. A war, a biography, a history of a period, a murder case, seventeenth-century Dutch art, Greek cooking, traveling through Japan - all are limited by the factual information available, at which point it becomes a matter of selection and arrangement of that information. It is relatively easy to convey in an outline an author's familiarity with his subject, his enthusiasm for it, his authority, the uniqueness of the proposed work, its organization, and so forth. It is even possible to convey in an outline how good a writer the author is. A good nonfiction outline is a pleasure from the viewpoint of publishers. It takes five minutes to read, requires little imagination to grasp, and enables an editor (or anyone else at a publishing company) to make his mind up quickly and decisively. It is hard for most writers to visualize the joy it gives an editor to be able to reach a clean, fast decision, and this factor may have contributed in no small measure to the increased predilection for nonfiction at most trade publishing companies over the last few years.
A solid nonfiction outline should follow these basic precepts:
· Establish your authority. At the very outset you must show the publisher your credentials. It has become extremely difficult to sell proposals by writers who do not have a Ph.D. or M.D. after their names or cannot otherwise demonstrate long and vast experience in the field in which they are writing. As you might do with any other resume, if you have great bona fides, pile them on; if you don't, then stress the next best thing, to wit: "Although I am not an M.D. I have written about medical subjects for leading national magazines for the last twenty years." And if you cannot even boast that much, I strongly advise you to write a large piece of the book so that your authority and familiarity with your subject shine through by virtue of the writing itself.
Present your thesis dramatically. The best outlines read like the best short stories, and like great stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In enunciating the subject, you should present a disturbing problem that cries out for resolution: "The teenage suicide rate has tripled in the last ten years." "As the First Continental Congress convened, the American colonies seemed very far indeed from the unification we take for granted today." "Although there are many books available on Jewish cooking, to date there is no comprehensive work on cheese blintzes."
You now have the editor worried: how did the teenage suicide rate get to be so bad, what is the profile of a potential teen suicide, what can parents do about it? Here is where you display your intimacy with your subject, for as these questions occur to the editor considering your presentation, one by one your outline answers them satisfyingly and, if possible, entertainingly.
Like a good short story, your outline should rise to a satisfying climax, and here is where your writing skills must be displayed in all their splendor, for editors know that an author's interest and energy tend to flag in the final stages of a book and they want to see whether you can sustain the same level of intensity in the finale as you did in the opening stages of the work. You should therefore describe in vivid detail the culmination of your book. Whatever it was that originally inspired you to write it must be communicated here, and whether you're writing a biography, history, medical self-help book, or even a blintz cookbook, you must demonstrate in these final passages of your synopsis your intense absorption in your material. Depict in full dress that final battle, that cure, that turning point in the life of your biographical subject. Let your editor know you're in love with this idea and will live in a constant state of torment until you have gotten it out of your system.
· Furnish a table of contents. Each chapter of your proposed book should be summarized in a short paragraph. Although a table of contents would appear to go over the same ground as your synopsis, it actually serves a different purpose. A synopsis is a narrative summarizing the topic and exhibiting the author's grasp of his material and writing skill. A table of contents demonstrates the author's organizational abilities and conveys the "feel" of the final book. It may seem redundant, but editors demand it. Don't leave home without one.
· Anticipate a publishing committee's questions. However masterfully you have synopsized your book, some important questions will probably linger in the editor's mind, and others will be raised by non-editorial staff members of the publishing committee. What competitive books exist or are in the works? What is the potential audience, and how can a publisher be sure that that audience will buy the book? Could a Big Name be induced to write an introduction or endorsement? Can you state with assurance that this organization or that society will approve the book, recommend it to members, purchase a minimum number of copies?
It is unfortunate that authors must do the sort of research that is the rightful province of publishers, but because publishing people have so little time and money to spare for market surveys, library searches, legal investigations, profit-and-loss evaluations, and the like, any author who does the publisher's homework for them will definitely raise his chances of landing a sale. So go the extra mile. You've always said you could do a better job than a publisher: here's your chance to prove it.
The outlining of fiction is an entirely different ball game. None of the criteria that enable editors to make quick and easy decisions about nonfiction book proposals applies to fiction outlines, for almost everything is subjective. Although it is even more important for a novel outline than it is for a nonfiction book outline to read like an enthralling short story, even wonderful novel outlines don't necessarily demonstrate convincingly that the writer is a good storyteller, has fine descriptive abilities, is capable of capturing subtleties of emotion, or knows how to build character and relationships. And, paradoxically, any attempt to portray such elements in an outline often results in a long and tedious one that is excruciatingly dull. Furthermore, nothing in an outline can demonstrate whether the author can go the distance or will falter or lose energy or inspiration during the writing of the novel. It is far more common for novelists to slump in the midst of a book than for nonfiction writers, whose inspiration derives from already existing material rather than from anything they have to create. And while editors who have the novelist's track record to go by can say, "See? He finished six novels, what makes you think he isn't going to finish his seventh?" a novel proposal must be judged by a lot of non-editorial people at a publishing company. Many of them are a little suspicious of, or even downright hostile to, the creative process, and therefore skeptical that a novelist will be able to stay the course. What is worse, they can relate many unfortunate experiences bearing their skepticism out. Resistance to fiction outlines runs extremely high at most publishers, and that's why one finds prodigious piles of them on so many editors' desks.
There are important exceptions, of course. The well-established novelist can land a contract on the basis of an outline, and often a brief one. And writers doing novels in a series or proposing books for a particular line, will of course have to do outlines. But authors who have no solid fiction track record are going to get nowhere in their quest to raise funds to complete their books. Or if they do, miraculously, get an offer, it will undoubtedly be a stingy one, because the publisher is being asked to invest his risk capital, and the costs of risk capital are extremely high.
I therefore advise anyone in that position to write a long, boring, detailed outline of his novel-to-be, take it to his word processor, and sit down and write the novel. Not a third; not a half; all of it. Shift the risk from the publisher to yourself - because it means shifting the rewards as well. Give an agent a finished novel that he likes and watch him do his thing: he can auction it, set a tight deadline for decisions, get a high price, break the author out.
What's that you say? You can't afford to write that novel on speculation? I'm afraid you'll have to do what the novelists of yore did: they begged, borrowed, stole, got day jobs, or married into money. One of my colleagues, a very tough lady agent with a tongue like a trash can, was once visited by an author who presented her with a portion and outline of a novel. She read it that night and next day summoned him to her office. "It's great," she declared. "It's brilliant."
The author was thrilled. "So?"
"So?" Whaddya mean, so?"
"I mean, what happens now? Are you going to hold an auction or what? Are you going to seek a high floor or solicit a preemptive...?"
"Hold on. I said it's brilliant, I didn't say I could sell it. For me to sell it, you have to finish it."
The author turned pale and started to sputter. "But...but...how am I going to support myself while I'm finishing it?"
"Drive a f*****g taxi," she said.
He drove a f*****g taxi and returned, eight months later, with a great novel, which she sold for a lot of money and which established him as a leading commercial novelist.
Applications for chauffeurs' licenses are now being accepted.
This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.
Too many writers dismiss outlines as unworthy of serious attention, or not essential to the practice of their trade. "I'm a good writer, but a lousy outliner," I frequently hear, and the statement often sounds like a boast. "What does it matter?" goes another typical remark. "My finished books don't resemble my outlines anyway, so why bother?" Still others say, "The outline is in my head, and as long as my books turn out well, why should I have to outline them on paper?"
These scoffers have failed to understand the critical truth about outline writing: publishers are less interested in what's going into your book than they are in what's going onto your cover.
From what I know about publishing history, the use of outlines to sell books to publishers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before World War II, it was de rigueur for authors to submit completed manuscripts to their publishers. Even established authors wrote their books before seeking contracts with their regular publishers. They might consult with them in the formative stages, but it was pretty much taken for granted that the author knew what he was doing and where he was going with his book, and that editors served to help shape or tidy up the finished product. The purpose of outlines was, as you might expect, to help authors conceptualize and develop their books. It didn't matter if the outlines were long or short, well written or scribbled, highly compressed or elaborate (Henry James composed forty thousand word summaries of his later novels, declaring the process "The divine principle of the scenario"): an outline was a working sketch for the sole use of the author. It was not designed for display, particularly to publishers.
After World War II, the nature of publishing changed dramatically, affecting not only what kinds of books were written but how they got sold. Not the least of the transformations was that of the outline from writing tool to selling tool.
With the emergence of publishing as big business, with the acquisition of publishing companies by conglomerates or their absorption into immense entertainment complexes, a schism was created between the editorial and the business functions. Tremendous tensions were created as publishers demanded better justification for the purchasing of books. Profit-and-loss statements and market projections had to be drawn up before submissions were accepted. Editorial and publishing committees replaced the judgments of individual editors whose rationales for acquisition were often no more than intuition, enthusiasm, or personal pleasure.
In order to crack this increasingly formidable system, authors were required to produce detailed and polished presentations that answered not merely the question "What is it about?" but such questions as "How does it differ from similar books?" "What is the target market and how large is it?" and "Can a publisher make a profit on it?" It no longer mattered if an individual editor was wild about a book or a proposed book, because he was no longer the only person making the decision. Indeed, many of the people now making the decision might not have read the work at all, and not a few of them weren't particularly interested in books except in terms of their bottom line value as merchandise: how to "package" them, how to position advertising and promotion for them, how to price them, how to "move" them. Some writers realized that in order to satisfy this growing cadre of specialists, they'd have to learn a kind of writing very far from the sort of thing they'd been doing until then—not synopses but sales pitches cunningly contrived to subdue the anxieties of publishing personnel ranging from art director to head of sales to subsidiary rights director to publicity chief to vice-president in charge of marketing to editor.
If you piled all the outlines I have read in my lifetime on top of each other, they would reach the summit of Kanchenjunga. So I can say with some authority that few writers have grasped this crucial distinction between outlines designed to guide oneself through the complex terrain of plot and character and those written to turn on the staff of a publishing company. All too often I see chapter-by-chapter outlines of fifty or a hundred pages describing every twist of story and every nuance of character development, outlines that are 95 percent longer than most editors have the time or inclination to read, and that are deficient in many elements that are tempting to potential buyers. Such outlines should go back where they belong: beside the author's typewriter, helping him construct his book. But they don't belong on an editor's desk.
Let's look at the components of a solid outline. Naturally, we have to divide proposals into two categories: those for nonfiction books and those for novels.
Nonfiction books are both easier to outline and easier to sell from an outline. A nonfiction work lends itself to easy encapsulation because its subject is finite and usually defines itself. A war, a biography, a history of a period, a murder case, seventeenth-century Dutch art, Greek cooking, traveling through Japan - all are limited by the factual information available, at which point it becomes a matter of selection and arrangement of that information. It is relatively easy to convey in an outline an author's familiarity with his subject, his enthusiasm for it, his authority, the uniqueness of the proposed work, its organization, and so forth. It is even possible to convey in an outline how good a writer the author is. A good nonfiction outline is a pleasure from the viewpoint of publishers. It takes five minutes to read, requires little imagination to grasp, and enables an editor (or anyone else at a publishing company) to make his mind up quickly and decisively. It is hard for most writers to visualize the joy it gives an editor to be able to reach a clean, fast decision, and this factor may have contributed in no small measure to the increased predilection for nonfiction at most trade publishing companies over the last few years.
A solid nonfiction outline should follow these basic precepts:
· Establish your authority. At the very outset you must show the publisher your credentials. It has become extremely difficult to sell proposals by writers who do not have a Ph.D. or M.D. after their names or cannot otherwise demonstrate long and vast experience in the field in which they are writing. As you might do with any other resume, if you have great bona fides, pile them on; if you don't, then stress the next best thing, to wit: "Although I am not an M.D. I have written about medical subjects for leading national magazines for the last twenty years." And if you cannot even boast that much, I strongly advise you to write a large piece of the book so that your authority and familiarity with your subject shine through by virtue of the writing itself.
Present your thesis dramatically. The best outlines read like the best short stories, and like great stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In enunciating the subject, you should present a disturbing problem that cries out for resolution: "The teenage suicide rate has tripled in the last ten years." "As the First Continental Congress convened, the American colonies seemed very far indeed from the unification we take for granted today." "Although there are many books available on Jewish cooking, to date there is no comprehensive work on cheese blintzes."
You now have the editor worried: how did the teenage suicide rate get to be so bad, what is the profile of a potential teen suicide, what can parents do about it? Here is where you display your intimacy with your subject, for as these questions occur to the editor considering your presentation, one by one your outline answers them satisfyingly and, if possible, entertainingly.
Like a good short story, your outline should rise to a satisfying climax, and here is where your writing skills must be displayed in all their splendor, for editors know that an author's interest and energy tend to flag in the final stages of a book and they want to see whether you can sustain the same level of intensity in the finale as you did in the opening stages of the work. You should therefore describe in vivid detail the culmination of your book. Whatever it was that originally inspired you to write it must be communicated here, and whether you're writing a biography, history, medical self-help book, or even a blintz cookbook, you must demonstrate in these final passages of your synopsis your intense absorption in your material. Depict in full dress that final battle, that cure, that turning point in the life of your biographical subject. Let your editor know you're in love with this idea and will live in a constant state of torment until you have gotten it out of your system.
· Furnish a table of contents. Each chapter of your proposed book should be summarized in a short paragraph. Although a table of contents would appear to go over the same ground as your synopsis, it actually serves a different purpose. A synopsis is a narrative summarizing the topic and exhibiting the author's grasp of his material and writing skill. A table of contents demonstrates the author's organizational abilities and conveys the "feel" of the final book. It may seem redundant, but editors demand it. Don't leave home without one.
· Anticipate a publishing committee's questions. However masterfully you have synopsized your book, some important questions will probably linger in the editor's mind, and others will be raised by non-editorial staff members of the publishing committee. What competitive books exist or are in the works? What is the potential audience, and how can a publisher be sure that that audience will buy the book? Could a Big Name be induced to write an introduction or endorsement? Can you state with assurance that this organization or that society will approve the book, recommend it to members, purchase a minimum number of copies?
It is unfortunate that authors must do the sort of research that is the rightful province of publishers, but because publishing people have so little time and money to spare for market surveys, library searches, legal investigations, profit-and-loss evaluations, and the like, any author who does the publisher's homework for them will definitely raise his chances of landing a sale. So go the extra mile. You've always said you could do a better job than a publisher: here's your chance to prove it.
The outlining of fiction is an entirely different ball game. None of the criteria that enable editors to make quick and easy decisions about nonfiction book proposals applies to fiction outlines, for almost everything is subjective. Although it is even more important for a novel outline than it is for a nonfiction book outline to read like an enthralling short story, even wonderful novel outlines don't necessarily demonstrate convincingly that the writer is a good storyteller, has fine descriptive abilities, is capable of capturing subtleties of emotion, or knows how to build character and relationships. And, paradoxically, any attempt to portray such elements in an outline often results in a long and tedious one that is excruciatingly dull. Furthermore, nothing in an outline can demonstrate whether the author can go the distance or will falter or lose energy or inspiration during the writing of the novel. It is far more common for novelists to slump in the midst of a book than for nonfiction writers, whose inspiration derives from already existing material rather than from anything they have to create. And while editors who have the novelist's track record to go by can say, "See? He finished six novels, what makes you think he isn't going to finish his seventh?" a novel proposal must be judged by a lot of non-editorial people at a publishing company. Many of them are a little suspicious of, or even downright hostile to, the creative process, and therefore skeptical that a novelist will be able to stay the course. What is worse, they can relate many unfortunate experiences bearing their skepticism out. Resistance to fiction outlines runs extremely high at most publishers, and that's why one finds prodigious piles of them on so many editors' desks.
There are important exceptions, of course. The well-established novelist can land a contract on the basis of an outline, and often a brief one. And writers doing novels in a series or proposing books for a particular line, will of course have to do outlines. But authors who have no solid fiction track record are going to get nowhere in their quest to raise funds to complete their books. Or if they do, miraculously, get an offer, it will undoubtedly be a stingy one, because the publisher is being asked to invest his risk capital, and the costs of risk capital are extremely high.
I therefore advise anyone in that position to write a long, boring, detailed outline of his novel-to-be, take it to his word processor, and sit down and write the novel. Not a third; not a half; all of it. Shift the risk from the publisher to yourself - because it means shifting the rewards as well. Give an agent a finished novel that he likes and watch him do his thing: he can auction it, set a tight deadline for decisions, get a high price, break the author out.
What's that you say? You can't afford to write that novel on speculation? I'm afraid you'll have to do what the novelists of yore did: they begged, borrowed, stole, got day jobs, or married into money. One of my colleagues, a very tough lady agent with a tongue like a trash can, was once visited by an author who presented her with a portion and outline of a novel. She read it that night and next day summoned him to her office. "It's great," she declared. "It's brilliant."
The author was thrilled. "So?"
"So?" Whaddya mean, so?"
"I mean, what happens now? Are you going to hold an auction or what? Are you going to seek a high floor or solicit a preemptive...?"
"Hold on. I said it's brilliant, I didn't say I could sell it. For me to sell it, you have to finish it."
The author turned pale and started to sputter. "But...but...how am I going to support myself while I'm finishing it?"
"Drive a f*****g taxi," she said.
He drove a f*****g taxi and returned, eight months later, with a great novel, which she sold for a lot of money and which established him as a leading commercial novelist.
Applications for chauffeurs' licenses are now being accepted.
This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.
Labels: Essays, Literary Agents, Publishing Industry, Richard Curtis, Writers
