result is the kind of story where you do not know why one incident was included rather than another, or what is the purpose of it all. Behind such a hodgepodge is always a writer who starts without a defined plan and then writes as his feelings dictate.
The best metaphor for the relationship of an outline to a story is blueprints in relationship to a building. Nobody can start piling up girders or making window trimmings without a blueprint; a blueprint is necessary in order to judge what are the stresses and strains, and what to put where. The same is true of the construction of a story.
If you can carry the outline in your mind, you do not have to write it down, but it is helpful to do so if the story is complex. You might hold a story in your mind in a generalized way and think it is all in order; yet when you put it down on paper, you might discover dull stretches in which nothing in particular happens, or omissions of elements necessary to make later events dramatic.
By writing down the outline, I do not mean writing a synopsis in objective terms that an outsider would understand. I make my outlines as brief as possible, in what I call “headline style.” For instance, the events that finally went into Atlas Shrugged were all present in my outline, but in this form: “[Chapter I] ‘Who is John Galt?’ Eddie Willers, Taggart Transcontinental, James Taggart. Trouble on the Colorado line. Taggart’s evasions.”2 When I write an outline, I know more specifically than this what will go under the general headings, but I write down only what I need in order to remember the progression and to get a bird’s-eye view of the structure
There is no rule about how detailed or concise to make your outline. Train yourself to know how much you can carry in your head, and how much you need to write down in order to see the total and keep the structure of your story clear in your mind.
When you come to the actual writing, there is no rule which demands that you have to write from the first chapter onward. If your outline is good and you know where you are going, the order of execution is optional. Some writers write the end first, or any scene which they particularly want to write. This is permissible provided they are skillful enough to hide the seams—i.e., provided they can edit and integrate the total so that it reads as if the writer had started from the beginning.
I myself always start at the beginning. I can make notes on scenes, or on dialogue, in advance, but I cannot do the actual writing out of sequence; I deal with such complex issues that too much in each scene depends on what has been established earlier. If I started to concretize something in the middle while the concretes of the beginning were not firmly set in my mind, I would never be able to integrate the total or to write any scene properly.
There is another reason why I cannot write out of sequence, even on a simple story like Anthem. I am always very aware of what has gone before. One of my methods is to have plants in the course of a story, on which I play later; i.e., I have references in later scenes to something that was established earlier. For instance, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Eddie Willers is suddenly talking to Dagny [in his imagination], addressing a memory of their childhood that was planted in the first chapter. When I wrote that particular passage in the first chapter, eleven years before I came to the end, I knew that I was planting it for this purpose. I did the same with Halley’s Fifth Concerto: the description of it in the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged is copied verbatim in the last. When the reader comes to it the second time, the same words have acquired a much fuller meaning. In the first chapter, they are a generalized emotional abstraction; by the end, they are a philosophical-emotional summation of the ideas of the story.
Planting those small touches in a scene to cash in on them later is a personal preference of mine. Every good writer does not necessarily do it, and I mention it here only as one reason why I prefer to write from the beginning onward. But that is not