Everything I Know About Outlining I Learned from Elizabeth George
An encounter with a mystery novelist changed the way I work. Maybe.
Mystery writer Elizabeth George came to speak at my MFA one year. She was super nice and then she said something in her lecture like, “Writing is a joy. I don’t know why everyone says it’s so hard.”
After we had patiently waited out the moment where we wanted to put her in stocks, she clarified: George, writer of the Detective Lynley series, is an inveterate outliner.
You’re thinking, what does wailing away on your keyboard like a baboon on ice pops* (“Writing is a joy”) have to do with outlining?
Sometimes you have to really knuckle down to find joy
Writing was always a joy, said Elizabeth George, because, by the time she sat down to actually write, she’d already spent months outlining her work. She knew exactly where her characters were going to be, at any given time or place: She knows what’s going to happen to them whole books into the future, in fact.
I still wasn’t making the connection: Even though I’d read every one of George’s Lynley novels by the time I met her (the last one I read clocked in at 692 pages**), I couldn’t understand why George wouldn’t…
