Outlining: It Gives You Superpowers

The Ghost Series contains many wonders, some of which have made our planning more complicated. One wondrous element in particular is a pain in the butt: some of the characters are precognitive.

Precognition is what many RPG rule systems refer to as an unbalanced power. If mismanaged, it takes all the fun out of the game. You end up with a player who wants to roll dice every time their character takes a step. The same basic problem can arise with fiction. It’s crucial to place heavy constraints on any precogs you let loose in your world, so they can’t just spoil everything. Yet, the ability to see into the future has to be of some value. They have to be right sometimes or else they’re not precogs, they’re just delusional. In fact, allowing them more power brings more potential for excitement and intrigue.

What you want is a way to level the playing field, so you can match wits against precognitive beings and win. If only you, too, could gain the power to foretell the future.

With an outline, you can! (You knew that was coming — hey, are you psychic?)

There are those who complain about writing from an outline precisely for this reason: you already know how the story will go. We see that as a strength. You can focus on telling the story well, because you don’t have to spend energy inventing it as you go. You can do foreshadowing and recurring themes in a very intentional way.

Here in the Writing Cave, there’s another way that we hold our own when our characters are supernaturally gifted. We gang up on them. A writing partner doubles the number of brain cells available when you need to come up with a way to surprise the precogs.