Outlines, Outliers, Messengers, Massagers

outline--a template or design for a dramatic narrative; a scene-by-scene breakdown of an intended story; a thematic riff intended to lead the writer through the development and orchestration of a concept through its conceptual stage into viable story; the first step in a process that is completed with revision.

Some writers will not consider beginning work on the text of a story without some form of road map which guides them in varying degree of detail through the development and enhancement of a story. Other writers will argue that such an approach precludes surprise, an essential ingredient not only to the reader but as well to the writer. The late, prolific suspense and thriller writer, Dennis Lynds (aka John Crowe, Michael Collins, Carl Dekker) developed a mid-range outline in which he sketched a situation in which a character became engaged in a fast-growing complication, "wrote" his character to the edge of the complication, then stopped writing to expand the outline to cover the next forty or fifty pages before returning to text. Lynds did this until the final resolution, at which point he began revision, looking first for anomalies in the plot/motivation structure.

The jury is expected to be out for some indeterminate time on the outline or no outline question. There is no evidence to show that working with an outline makes the work easier or if, indeed, writers who outline are more prolific than those who do not.

Hint: How many of your last five stories (of any length) were written from outline? What does your answer to this question tell you?

Added hint: Try outlining in some detail your next novel, keeping opinionated notes about your progress as you proceed with writing text. What does this tell you?

Yet another hint: Try outlining a novel by using three x five index cards, one for each proposed scene, using as few as one or two sentences to describe the intended scene.

The major points to be made here: (1) an outline is not a sine qua non of a story or novel (2) there is nothing "wrong" with you if you chose to outline (3) there is nothing "wrong" with you if you do not chose to outline, and (4) the decision to outline or not is one of the choices you will have to make on your journey toward becoming a writer.


messenger--a character who physically brings news on stage (into the narrative); an individual who by example becomes a recognizable symptom that could befall a front-rank character.

Ever since the days in which authors not only could but were expected to directly address the reader, a persistent opposition to the practice has evolved. Henry Fielding's picaresque romp,Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne's rollicking Tristram Shandy (1759) led the way toward the authorial aside, a technique that may be yet employed today, provided it is done with an inventive purpose--otherwise editors will thank you for thinking of them and wish you good luck elsewhere. Enter the messenger, appropriately dressed for work in your story, bearing some message, intent, or example of behavior thought to be of contextual interest to the reader.

Messengers are of primary importance in contemporary fiction because the reader may still have his doubts about the author, but if the reader has gone beyond the first five or six paragraphs of a short story or the first chapter of a novel, the reader arguably believes the characters more than he believes the author.

A Cock and Bull Story

It is a truth universally recognized--sound familiar?--that anything labeled a cock and bull story is something to be regarded as untrustworthy, fanciful at best, or a deliberate attempt at deception.

My opening observation, borrowing the first six words of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is a lovely case in point because Ms. Austen goes on to formulate from this universal truth that a young man in possession of a fortune must perforce be in search of a wife. Thus does Ms. Austen present her credentials as an ambassador plenipotentiary of irony, the reason being that it is not at all a certainty that a wealthy young man wants to get married; the greater certainty is that he wants to get laid.

Another truth universally recognized,at least within the book trade in the United States, in this case by the estimable CMOS, The Chicago Manual of Style, is the use of the serial comma. This is no cock and bull story. Oops, the very mention of CMOS has me recalling another convention, and thus cock-and-bull story (because it is neither a cock story or a bull story; it is a compound adjective now, made to service a noun--story.)

Although the origins of the expression are at odds (and don't tell me to Google and Wikipedia it because I did) and inconclusive, twentieth- and now twenty-first century convention pretty well establishes it, a cock-and-bull story is accepted for truth at one's risk.

George W. Bush, for instance, listened to Paul Wolfowitz's theories about the outcome of our intervention in Iraq, taking in as established wisdom a notorious cock-and-bull story.

Not willing to be regarded historically as one who listened to a cock-and-bull story, and risked the reputation of the forty-third (another CMOS convention--you spell out numbers) President of the United States on his subsequent behavior, George W. Bush has shown he can initiate cock-and-bull stories as well, the most recent example given barely hours before these vagrant lines are written: The Democratic-controlled Congress is refusing to fund our troops. Pure C & B. The Congress is willing to write a hundred billion-dollar check to support our troops.

Well, enough--literally and figuratively--of our forty-third president and his vice president, although it is fun to wonder, when they discuss things, which is the cock and which is the bull.

Talking animals have held a significant place in the literature of the ages, seemingly well suited to illustrate fables, satires, and tales. Grendel comes quickly to mind, she of Beowulf and the eponymous novel by John Gardener. Aesop put words into the mouths of animals; so did George Orwell, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Dragons, wolves, unicorns all have had their say, some prescient and others hysterical (see Henny-Penny).

A cock-and-bull story is built in the first place to deceive, divert, or delay. A cock-and-bull story is the dog ate my homework writ large. If the deception has as its purpose an amusing payoff and/or a moral purpose, such as those told by Mark Twain, we are often the better for it, refreshed, our critical senses laundered and hung out to dry in the sunshine of reason and self-examination. If the deception is to tighten the grip of fear and control, the believer becomes in time as much at fault as the perpetrator.

For those of us who are book oriented, it becomes pleasing to think of an anthology, perhaps even a lofty Oxford Companion to the Cock and Bull Story. Imagine the fun and clamor. The anthology is to be divided into two parts; no not Cock and Bull, but rather For Fun and For Real.

The aforementioned Mr. Twain would be a welcomed addition to the fun side, as well as one of his modern embodiments, Kurt Vonnegut.

Imagine the mischief and consternation and competition for inclusion in the For Real side, those men and women who promulgate C & B as though they had come down from the mountain top, bearing an engraved slab of granite:

Phyllis Schlaffly
The Rev. Falwell
The Rev. Robertson
Number Forty-three and his Vice-president
Charles Krauthammer
Ann Coulter
William Krystol
Jean Schmidt (the GOP wingnut rep from Ohio)

and, as the late, lamented Mr. Vonnegut would have said, so it goes.


The cock-and-bull story can be a lovely learning experience, or a one-way ticket to the worst kind of convention of all. My personal belief of it is that it is the forerunner of the tall tale in the grand tradition of the American West. One place to look for its origins is in that remarkable novel about origins and reality, Tristram Shandy,
in which a character says, "It is a story about a Cock and a Bull--and the best of its kind that I have ever heard."