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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38064
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38064
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

No, you should not expect to feel your outline. An outline, by its nature, strips away all the particular details that create an emotional response. Our emotional responses are naturally regulated, tamped down, if you will, to make life bearable. If we reacted equally to every emotional stimulus, particularly to the bare report of an emotionally charged event, we would quickly become nervous wrecks. When you look at Google maps and see an accident on your normal route to work, you don't burst into tears, though you must know that some people are going through some pretty bad trauma right about now. You just take an alternate route to work, equanimity undisturbed.

It is only when you learn that your cousin or your neighbour or your colleague were involved in that crash that you start to feel anything. You feel it then because you have a connection to the person it happened to.

The difference between an outline and a story is precisely that the outline strips away all the peculiarities that allows our emotions to engage with someone. An outline strips all of the emotional triggers from a story.

Except, of course, that emotional triggers can be tricky things, and in some cases the smallest thing can be the greatest trigger. So it is possible that even when stripped of all human specificity, you may react to the character in an outline based on the mere mention that they are in a wheelchair or own a puppy or play lacrosse. But those are individual outlying triggers. A normal outline is trigger-free for most people. The point of telling the full story in all of its intense detail is precisely to create triggers in the reader so that you can produce the emotional reaction that the outline would not produce.

For all these reasons, BTW, I look with deep suspicion on the notion that you should start a novel by outlining the plot. A better approach, in my view, would be to plan the emotional triggers that you intend to create and how and where you intend to activate them. A story is a series of triggers, carefully prepared and activated, so that the reader's emotional system is in a constant cycle of tension and release. You won't get that from an outline. If you did, there would be no need to write the story.

Original score: 3