Writers, for the most part, can be divided in two groups; those who outline and those who don’t. I outline because I’ve learned the hard way that if I try to wing it, I’ll never get to the end of the story. (It’s why I have to follow a map when I’m traveling, so I can actually get to Montreal or Boston, instead of ending up at the Museum of SPAM* in some town I’ve never heard of.)

A book begins for me with a what-if. For Responsible, available this month, the what-if was, What if you did the right thing and it messed up your life? I thought about this person, trying to do what’s right, and Kevin Frasier began to take shape. Some writers create pages of background for every major character. Not me. What I need to know before I start writing is who the person is—what does he need, what does he want?

Once I knew Kevin I could work out the rest of the story. At this point in the outline process I know where the story starts and how I want things to end. And I usually have a couple of what I call “crisis points” figured out for the middle. I write down everything that occurs to me as I’m outlining—lines of dialogue, even an entire scene—but for the most part the outline lacks all the details that make a good story. The difference between it and the actual book is the difference between saying, “I had a car accident,” and saying, “I was waiting at the light at the intersection of Main and Fulton Avenue when two police cars chasing a moose ran the light and crashed into me.”

How long the outline ends up depends on the book. For me, this is part of the creative process. I keep going until I know the story. By that time I’m usually getting itchy to start writing. There are a million decisions to make writing a book. I like to get a lot of them out of the way before I start writing.

Next time I’ll show you how a scene was described in the outline and how the finished scene turned out.

* There really is a Museum of SPAM. It’s in Austin, Minnesota.

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