FOR PART ONE in this series, click here.
AFTER THE PITCH to the network is approved, the outline is the first attempt by the writer to order the possible beats into a workable structure. The idea is to suggest locations, action and drama that will tell an interesting story, and also to hint at character beats that will tie into the series as a whole.
The outline is a reductive document, which is to say it tries to distill the many lofty ideas that might have come up or come out during the process of breaking the story and tie it down into a logical progression of beats. Rarely does this involve thinking in more than a cursory way about where those beats will be shot. The best you hope for when you write it up is to have a vague sense of whether you’re in the ballpark. Do you have a rough split of location/in studio sets shooting? Is there too much action? Not enough? Where does the pacing of the story lag or where might need the most work? Is the progression of the story logical? Is the emotional content of the scenes sustainable and workable? Do the act outs provide sufficient “oomph” to carry a viewer through two and one half minutes of selling soap?
At this point, the major audience and sales target for the document is not production: it’s the network. The idea is to get them into and enthusiastic about the upcoming story. Consequently, outlines sometimes have a more ‘sales-y’ than practical read to them. They will also include some bridge phrasing that papers over some stuff that still needs to be figured out. We call this ‘handwaving.’ The more handwaving there is in the document, the more the writer has to figure out in the first draft. (Which is why you don't want to fall to putting too much of that in: you'll pay for it later.)
There is extremely limited utility to other departments in reading the outline. It may give casting a rough idea of characters who may show up in the draft (though those characters are subject to great change and even excision;) props might get their first clue as to what sundries might be requested. Locations can get thinking about possible locales that might be called upon. But all of this is fluid and at such an early stage, with so many asterisks beside it, that you run a strong risk of doing a lot of thinking and planning for naught. With locations and props especially, everything is up for grabs until a later script stage. To the AD’s, an outline is practically useless, unless they enjoy feeling anxious.
Creatively, most writers try to keep their outlines free of dialogue (because if it’s in the outline, it will seem “tired” to the network by the time they read it for the third or fourth time in the production draft; conversely, they may get attached to some piece of “outline dialogue” that was obvious and never intended to survive. )
Writers often try to “undersell” the amount of action in the outline, because they know that it’s so fluid, and changeable, and subject to real-world concerns, that beats will probably be combined and eliminated, and you don’t want the network to get the sense that there are things they bought in the outline that are dropped for the draft. If you get the note, “what happened to XXX from the outline?” that is actually a pretty good indicator that you’ve overpromised in the outline.
Outlines can run for 10-15 pages for an hour, or they can run slightly more detailed at 20-25 pages, (though these are the outlines that are most likely to suffer from over-promising, and might challenge a writer trying to get the full story into the script at first draft stage.)
If you were to count the number of suggested scenes in an outline, it would likely give you a massive heart attack.
Next: the first draft
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