In the comment trail, excellent commenter Annie said:
But I can't quite imagine how I'd outline a story, since all I have are scenes. The few I've written down I already know would have to be thrown out--the setting isn't right, the characters are a different age than I thought, etc. And then there's a character off stage who's not even in the story, and I find him really annoying. I'm in awe of you and other writers who can live with the unrulyness.
Scenes come up and clamor for attention and we love them all as a hen loves her chicks.
But we must stop thinking -- Is this scene not wonderful? Is this scene not cool? And start thinking -- what does this scene do?
An Outline is simply a list of scenes that tells the story.
Lots of stuff goes on in our fictive world . . . . battles and betrayals and getting yer hair cut and eating asparagus.
We have to pick just a few morsels of all this activity for the manuscript.
We fall in love with the scenes that come to us.
It is a traditional weakness that we collect up wonderful scenes that take place before the story actually starts and make them Chapters One-through-Three. This leads to many a carefully crafted Chapter One-through-Three being torn out by the roots.
All along, we create scenes that serve no story purpose.
They become outtakes.
It's like some cruel sacrifice to the Writing Gods.
In the end, in a mood of cold, dire ruthlessness quite alien to our character, we will gather to our bosoms the few, favored scenes that tell the story and toss the others away onto the scrapheap of our subconscious where they will jitter at us in dreams for the next decade which is why we are like this.
How do we take the inchoate mass of possible scenes -- which are not in any order and some of them don't fit at all and we have no idea how they relate -- and make story?
Well . . . we outline.
Basic process, (and I am talking about my process, since I have no idea what anybody else does,) is we work backwards.
We go from what we need back to what we have imagined.
Ok.
There are several kinds of scenes we need.
I) -- We need scenes that convey plot.
Plot consists of a series of Necessary Actions. You know something is a 'Necessary Action' because if you leave it out or you change it, the story doesn't happen. All else being equal, we try to show these Necessary Action on stage because they tend to be interesting.
II) -- We need scenes that change the protagonist.
In a coming-of-age story, the change might be his developing maturity. In a spy thriller, this might be the villain deciding to blow something up, or the hero deciding to leave his comfortable retirement and go hunt villains.
In Romance genre,
(I love Romance genre because it is straightforward,)
this character change is growth of the love relationship.
In a Romance genre story, we show the Character Change as a series of Romance Stages. There is an analog to the Action Plotting in that there are Necessary Romance Stages.
You know something is a Necessary Romance Stage because if you leave it out, the love relationship doesn't hold together. It seems unrealistic.
(Erotica is not Romance genre because there is no development of a love relationship through a series of stages.)
See how when I talk about the kind of scenes we need I am
not saying, scenes that 'explain why,' or scenes that 'set up the story,' or scenes that 'reveal character'?
We do not write scenes to convey information.
Really. We don't. There are reasons for this.
III) -- And we need scenes that are just so wonderful we can't leave them out.
"No, we don't."
"Yes, we do."
"No."
"Yes".
"Oh, go ahead and add them. I can't stop you. But the editor is going to jerk them out anyway."
(jo's subconscious pouts.)
Just about every scene in the final manuscript will be built around either
Necessary Plot Action or
Character Change. That's what we outline.
See how this helps corral the little darlings?
Even before we begin to outline we can shoo away many of those clucking, fluttering, beloved scenes
because they do
not contain the protagonists learning and changing,
do
not contain action that is essential to the plot,
and a good many of them do
not even occur within the brief span of the story here-and-now.
This gets rid of much of the chirping throng.
SPOILERS lie below the cut.
BIG SPOILERS.
Just don't go there if you haven't read
Forbidden Rose.