To outline or not to outline?

I'm a little in limbo-land at the moment. I've gotten as far as having my expression of interest accepted by my university, and subsequently been invited to apply for PhD candidature. I've found an advisor who is excited about my topic (the validation of this! It is actually a viable research topic, not just something I'm making up in my head!). I'm working through the very detailed RHD application, retraining my brain to think in methodologies and terminology. I'll be flying to Brisbane at the end of the month to attend an application workshop run by the EMSAH school (that's how intense this process is; there is a workshop on applying). As suggested by the school, I'm aiming for an end-of-April submission so I can be on time for the next scholarship round in May. There's little point in submitting earlier, as a) I'm still in Sydney and b) I'm very much relying on the scholarship round.

So I'm not working, and I'm not officially a doctoral student yet. I guess that makes me, at worst, an unemployed bum. At best, a housewife, or, if I were to really wank it up, a full-time writer.

I have been writing again, which is exciting and daunting all at once. I'm definitely out of practice. You would think that my time as a book editor trained me to be a better writer, but I'm a little brain-fried on words, to be honest. I'm also very used to working with something existing and spit-shining it, not to filling a blank page with my own ideas. Also - and I'm going to dispel a myth about book editing right now - I actually didn't spend a great deal of my time on text. Perhaps 20 per cent of my working hours at the most. The majority of 'editing' is organising photo shoots, writing emails, wrangling publishers, salespeople and authors into compromise, briefing designers, researching images, contracting freelancers, attending meetings, calming diva c-grade celebrities who throw daily tantrums over their crappy book...

So the additions I have made to my books have been painfully extracted from my head with forceps and kind of haphazardly thrown on the page, where they look awkward and unloved. It's quite depressing, especially when I read earlier parts and think 'hmmm, this is not bad, not bad at all'. I know that the unwavering writing mantra is 'just write, even if it's crap, write and fix it later' but it's discouraging to be unhappy with everything that comes out.

I think the worst thing for me is that it's not just the actual words, but the question of 'what happens next?' I get stuck on that question a lot. I have a basic plot in place for both books I've been working on, I know how they begin and how they end and (more or less) what happens in between. It's the in between the between that stumps me; the details that make a novel the complex, rich thing that it is, as opposed to shorter narrative.

This leads me to the topic of today's post, because it's always at this point that I start to consider writing a complete outline. It's a long-standing debate in the writing community - well, debate is actually not the right word, as everyone tends to agree that writers write differently, and if something works for you, do it. But basically, there are two kinds of writers: outliners, and seat-of-your-pants-ers. I'm not sure which one I am. I outlined a previous work-in-progress, in detail, from beginning to end. And when I came to actually write it, I felt like all the magic had gone. I was bored, and I hadn't been before I outlined it. I put that one away to be stewed on and looked at later.

For the current two, I haven't outlined at all, save for a few notes on the direction I think things will go and some of those 'blinding flashes' of inspiration for later scenes that I need to put down lest they disappear forever. And now I am very much feeling my way forward in the dark, getting nowhere, and considering sitting down and blueprinting the whole damn creation.

The fear, I think, is that outlining will corral me into something and stunt that sort of free-flow imaginative process where I sometimes surprise myself with what comes out. Often, things make much more sense that way than if I'd thought it through from beginning to end. ('So that's why she did that. Huh.') I guess there is some ideology here of 'discovering' the story rather than contriving it.

But then, if it's not working, it's not working, right?