Cooking with a Recipe...i.e. I’m a Plotter!

In college, my dinners were pasta or sandwiches. Dessert was microwaved s’mores. When I got married, I actually had to cook. You know, with real meat and raw vegetables and spices. I had to read recipes and buy the ingredients and somehow make it look like the cookbook picture. Luckily, I come from a tradition of great cooks, so I had skill in this domestic area!

Eventually I felt confident in my cooking and didn’t look over the recipes for meals I cooked regularly. In theory, this made sense to me. I’d made certain meals more than three times and had it completely memorized, right? Well...I really should’ve glanced at the recipes!

A chicken pot pie turned out thin and soupy when I forgot to drain the can of Veg-All. Once I cooked an easy steak much too long. Another time I forgot to moisten stuffing for a crock pot meal. It had rock-star rock-hard status. 

These weren’t disastrous meals, but they weren’t good either (my husband still ate all of them- bless him!). Now I know I need to look over recipes even if I’ve made the meal dozens of times before. I must make absolutely sure I’ve got all the ingredients and the correct cooking time and temperature or else no one will request another bite.

Just like I need a recipe for cooking, I need an outline for writing. I’m definitely a plotter. I wish I had the freedom of a pantser! But those times I’ve tried writing “by the seat of my pants” I ran into problems. Nothing disastrous, but definitely nothing juicy came out of it.

I don’t outline like the way school taught me. I don’t use Roman numerals or topics and subtopics (who has time for that stringent process?). I have a couple unfinished novels and one finished novel (thanks to NaNoWriMo ’09!). Before I started writing, I wrote a summary for each day in my novel touching on major plot points. I wrote character descriptions for every character no matter how minor, and I wrote down the major conflicts and resolutions. I also knew at least part of my ending. I outline very simply. It looks mostly like paragraphs with bulleted points. (For short stories, I do the same thing but it’s on a much smaller scale.)

I just need a plan to follow, all my ideas written down. Do I follow my outline perfectly? No! My outline changes throughout my writing process. When I cook, I read the entire recipe before starting and then I alter it however I want. I’ll fry the meat instead of baking it or I’ll skip black olives and add an onion. I do the same thing in my stories. A background character turns into a major player. Conflicts turn into something else entirely. But I need my outline there for when I run into problems. Then I turn to it and remember, “Oh, yea, this character meets this person who acts like this and makes this happens which turns into this and….” You get the idea. 

Outlines keep me from burning scrumptious ideas!

“The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.” ~George Stephen

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” ~E.L. Doctorow

Share with me!

Are you a plotter or a pantser? If a plotter, how do you outline? If a pantser, do you write any notes or just keep it all in your head as you type your story?