The Understory: A Versatile Technique for Outlining Short Stories

As a writer who spends a lot of time online, I've often heard the question, “Are you a plotter or a pantser?”

If these words are new to you, a "plotter" is someone who plots out their work and knows where their story will go before they start writing the first draft, and a "pantser" is someone who writes without an outline or a clear plot in mind—by the seat of their pants. You might also hear "outliner" instead of plotter, or "discovery writer" instead of pantser, or other terms that get at the same basic divide: outline or no outline.

Usually, these concepts are only applied to novels. There are workshops out there that teach you to outline, sometimes loosely and other times in exhaustive, prescriptive detail, while others offer techniques to "let your character tell their story" or let your imagination take you—and the book you're writing—where it will.

In most cases, I'm a plotter. I need the structure of an outline to figure out the story I want to tell—or at least to figure out how to tell it in a way that other people will find engaging. That's been the case pretty much ever since I started writing for publication, and it's still the case today, roughly fifteen years later.

When I'm writing a novel or novella, I definitely need that outline and its structure. Otherwise, all my work devolves into two characters standing around talking at each other about nothing. It’s interminable and dull, even for me as the writer.

Most of the time, I also outline short stories. I even outline flash fiction, at least if I'm telling a traditional story rather than writing something experimental.

I don't think I'm unique in doing this, but it was only recently that I realized outlining flash fiction might be unusual and that what I consider an "outline" is probably not what most folks think of when they hear that word.

Introducing the Understory

When some writers talk about outlines and hitting plot beats, it can sound like they're demanding you follow a rigid, unchangeable formula to make your story succeed—although they are almost certainly not. And even when they don't, I've seen (and followed!) techniques like that offer page or wordcount numbers for when a thing needs to happen (the Save the Cat method), or that suggest using detailed spreadsheets to move from elevator pitch to scene-by-scene descriptions (the Snowflake Method).

These types of outlining can be useful for novels, so long as you understand they’re a guide and not a strict, prescriptive formula, but they don't scale well to short stories, and certainly don't work at flash length.

And they don't work very well for how I write anything, since I often start writing to an outline, change my mind while drafting, and go back and revise the outline to match where I'm going with the story now. Sometimes, I do this several times!

Perhaps as a result, I've struggled to come up with a way of explaining outlines that doesn't make them sound like rigid, inescapable restraints. Even metaphorical terms like "road map" don't quite work, because maps (while they may change over time!) aren't going to suddenly change their shape in the course of a single journey.

Lately, though, I've been learning to watercolor, which means I've also been learning to draw. And this is where I've figured out a metaphor for outlining short stories that I like. So let's take a quick detour to the fine art world and examine the concept of the underdrawing.

In painting, an underdrawing is a preliminary sketch or painting applied to a canvas. They're intended not as a strict outline to copy but as more of a guide, a process of trying out forms and "envision and develop" their composition as it will appear in the final piece (definition from the University of Delaware).

A couple of crucial things to understand about underdrawings:

•  they can be as detailed or as simple as the artist prefers—sometimes they're even just blotches of color to represent shape or light values

•  the finished work can differ drastically from the underdrawing (for example, check out Edward Munch’s underdrawing for The Madonna [cn for nudity])

•  there are a bunch of different techniques and media you can use to make an underdrawing, and none of them are wrong

If we take the idea of an underdrawing and transpose it to the written word, we're left not with an outline you have to follow but with an understory. An underdrawing is not an exact outline to follow while painting and an understory is not that for writing, either. It’s more akin to a rough sketch—or even just a study in value and color—of what you want your story to be when it's finished.

 It's a tool you can use when outlining short stories to help you put your vision into words that tell a satisfying story. Something you can turn to when you're stuck, or need to be inspired again, or need to see the overall shape of your idea before diving back into the detail work.

And just like an underdrawing and a finished painting, the understory of your written work will almost certainly change by the time you're done with the rough draft and may change more before you consider the story finished.

How to Use an Understory When Outlining Short Stories

That's all well and good, but what does an understory actually look like?

When I’m outlining short stories, I tend to start with an image in mind. Sometimes that will be a character doing something at the story’s pivotal point. Sometimes it will be the last line of the story or the character’s inciting incident. Sometimes, I don’t have an image, just a concept I think is funny, interesting, or weird.

This is the core of my story-to-be, and once I know what it is, I’ll write out a sort of elevator pitch—a one-sentence description that names the character, what they’re trying to do, and what’s stopping them from succeeding. (In art terms, think of this as the roughest of rough figure drawings.)

Next, I’ll break that down into scenes, and usually, I’ll figure out how many words I want to spend on each—especially if what I’m writing is flash fiction. If I’m feeling particularly experimental, my understory might be as esoteric or vague as a list of neat things I want to reference in each scene of the story, like the example below for an unwritten flash fiction story where I just had a list of poems I wanted each scene to allude to both in form and in content.

Usually, though, I follow something closer to the Snowflake method. First, I figure out the number of scenes and what should be in each, generally speaking. Then I flesh out each scene description in writing with a sentence or two that describes the key role or roles it plays in the story and what needs to happen in it before I move to the next one.

In this example (from an unpublished short story), I also included how many words I thought each scene should be. That’s not too hard when you’ve been writing short stories for fifteen years and can roughly estimate scene length based on what it contains! The word counts help me stay on track and keep my story the size I want it to be. Especially useful for flash, where every word counts. (NB, maybe I’m not that good at it because the story that came out of this outline ended up being 5000 words—more than double the 2100 I estimated. Oops!)

One really nice thing about an understory is it lets me write out of order. If I’m super excited about the ending but a little unclear on the middle, I can bounce around to where my excitement takes me. If I’m writing on a computer (which I usually am these days), I’ll put my scene descriptions straight into the document and write around them.

Even when they’re super short, like “Kaya tosses stuff out”, the bracketed pseudo-scenes give me a good sense of the entire story’s shape long before I’m done with the draft, and a feeling of progress too. It’s great to cross those brackets out and replace them with actual words!

Understory? I Barely Even Know ‘ee!

You might not be taken by the idea of an “understory” or by the idea of outlining short stories at all. But it works well for me, at least.

If you’re stuck on your latest piece, why not give it a try?

About the Author

Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction, poetry, and (Nebula-nominated!) interactive fiction. His short story collection, The Butterfly Disjunct: And Other Stories, is out now from Interstellar Flight Press, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov's, Fantasy, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed, Nature, and various other places.

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