Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There are plenty of books out there explaining how and why you should outline your novel. It always seems like drudgery to me and so I’ve avoided it, for the most part.
As I write this review, my attempt at National Novel Writing Month 2017 is a smoking ruin. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. It was never smoking at all, more a damp lump of coal that never caught fire. In the vernacular of Libbie Hawker’s book, I wore my pants, refused to take them off (commit to an outline) and stalled before I could get anything going. This was also my experience on several dates ten years ago.
It’s been even worse, too–sometimes I’ve committed thousands of words to a story before realizing that it was going nowhere.
Having just gone through another stall-out, I was more receptive to the idea of outlining.
Hawker’s book is brief, more a bookling than a book, but the brevity works as a strength because you’ll whip through it quickly and be able to apply its lessons all the sooner. Hawker also smartly realizes many will read the book through first before going back and using it as reference, noting where to keep a bookmark so you can jump back in when you’re ready to go.
The process she uses for outlines is simple and leans heavily on using the hero’s journey as your story’s template. She provides some wiggle room but there is a basic assumption that you will be writing about a flawed main character (or several) who is thwarted by one or more antagonists, and ultimately overcomes their flaw or at least fails to in an interesting way, completing the character arc/journey.
And she makes it seem tantalizingly simple, extolling the twin benefits of locking down your story in advance (while still leaving plenty of space to be creative once you start writing scenes and chapters) and cranking out a completed first draft significantly faster than the pants-wearing method (she has completed first drafts in as little as three weeks). Hawker references several well-known novels (an eclectic group, ranging from Lolita to Charlotte’s Web), as well as her own work to provide examples of the different parts of the outline.
In brief, she says every well-constructed novel has a Story Core that consists of a flawed character who wants something, is thwarted, struggles to overcome their flaw, then ultimately fails or succeeds. The Story Core is built on a structure she compares to a three-legged stool, consisting of Character Arc, Theme and Pacing. It sounds simple and really, it is. As mentioned above, it’s the hero’s journey, a story archetype that has been around for thousands of years. As Hawker notes, your story will shine not because it’s outrageously original, but because it’s well-told and in a voice that is distinctly your own.
Even as I was still going through Take Off Your Pants! I was imaging the outline of my still-unfinished NaNoWriMo 2014 novel, a story that is pretty solid in some ways, but a bit of a meandering mess in others. Applying Hawker’s outlining methodology, I can see what’s missing from the story and identify entire scenes that can be chucked (goodbye, thousands of words, *sob*).
Take Off Your Pants! is highly recommended to those with a fear of outlining but still willing to take another look at it. I think it’s made me a convert.
