Moving Away from Your Outline

You may be the best outliner in the world. You may know everything about your characters, from their hair color to their shoe size to the alignment of the planets at the moment of their birth. And then, along comes the all-powerful Muse, right in the middle of your manuscript, and whispers in your ear: "Hey, your outline is awful. Your protagonist needs to be a good singer. This character needs to die. The bad guy needs to win." 

And you say, "Hey, I outlined all this. I have my protagonist outlined, I need that character to live, and the bad guy needs to lose. What are you doing in my head anyway?"

Yet you find yourself putting your protagonist in the middle of a duet, killing that character you love, and ending the book with a declaration from the antagonist that he's now the king of the world. 

"But my outline," you whisper sadly to yourself as your fingers follow the Muse's directions.You spent hours, days, maybe weeks plotting this book. And now it's spiraling out of your control.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. You may find that you were headed in the wrong direction with your outline. You may find that what you wanted to say wasn't what your outline told you to say. You may find your voice in this change. Remember, "a definition excludes the possibility for change."

You could also be steering off the road and into the path of a deer migration, which wouldn't be fun for anyone. 

My advice for when you don't know what to do with the changes? Make them anyway. Keep your outline handy, but it isn't the Bible, (Qur'an, Torah, etc.) You can change things about your plot and characters whenever you want. This is just an early draft. It's "shoveling sand into a box so that later [you ] can build castles," (Shannon Hale). Shovel all that sand into your computer, and take the time to reshape and mold it until you have a castle.

Don't be afraid to leave behind your outlines, and happy writing!