Outlines

[griff]

After 50 pages, should I go back and write an outline?

[trellicktower]

If you're stuck halfway through your story and don't know where it should go, then yes outlining to the end could help figure it out.

[Deleted]

I was 75 pages in...and then I got lost in my own story. (I also had some serious rewriting to do in those first 75 pages) I was no longer telling the story I wanted to tell.

I took a year off of writing my script and decided I really needed to learn the craft. I read and learned everything I could get my hands on.

I decided to take everyone's advice and start with an outline. It wasn't fun. It was boring and tedious and...wonderful! When I finished the outline I had this huge sense of accomplishment because I was able to finish the story in outline form. I now know where I am going in the story and I have a blueprint for my 120 pages.

It was great to work through the outline and have a new idea, and quickly be able to fit that new idea in without having to rewrite many pages to make that idea work.

Everyone is different, but I would recommend creating an outline.

[violet]

I don't know if this would work for you, but what I do to make outlining less painful is first write a sprawling page-long-ish description of my entire film. Then I make a new copy and break up all the description by rough sequences. And then I copy and paste it AGAIN, breaking up each individual sequence-cluster into sentences that represent individual scenes. It looks/sounds completely strange, but I know what scene my sentence fragments represent. And once it's all in order, spaced out, I print it make sure there are no plot holes, etc.
Then I rewrite with scene headings for every scene and short descriptions of what I have to remember to include in the scene. And then I print and draw checkboxes next to each heading, and check them off, cross them out, make BIG red slashes as I finish writing each scene.

It feels much less intimidating than sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and trying to remember everything you intend to write in ever single scene. And there's the most wonderful sense of accomplishment in checking off all those boxes as your draft grows in page count!

[scottmyers]

Griff, why not start with these basic questions and see what answers you have (or don't have):

Who is your Protagonist?

What do they want (P is typically conscious of this External World goal)?

What do they need (P is typically unconscious or repressing this Internal World goal)?

Who is keeping them from their goal (this is most likely your Nemesis)?

There are other character questions you can ask, but for starters, these are the most critical. Now some plot questions:

What happens at the beginning of Act One (how does your Protagonist begin the story)?

What happens at the end of Act One (what event thrusts the Protagonist out of their Ordinary World and into the new world or 'world of adventure' as J. Campbell would say)?

What happens at the end of Act Two (what plot point sets the Protagonist way back, an All Is Lost event)?

What happens at the end of Act Three (how does your Protagonist end the story / what transpires in the Final Struggle)?

If you don't have good, solid answers to those questions, then I would concur with your instinct to go back, figure out your story, and do an outline.

As I said on GITS, the single biggest reason most screenwriters don't finish a script is because they don't work up an outline during the prep-writing phase.

Good luck!

[poindexta]

I was totally stuck on outlining a rewrite and went through the Save the Cat model from start to finish, wrote out paragraphs for every section: Opening Image, Theme stated, bad guys close in...

It was like answering all the important questions about how my script worked and in the process exposed several flaws and was able to answer them in one hit. Big help.