Outlining: the South Park Rules

Photo by Fiona Smallwood on Unsplash

According to every internet search available, there are two types of writer: pantser and plotter. A pantser is someone who writes from the seat of their pants, letting the story unfold gracefully (or gracelessly) in front of them. A plotter is someone who plots out every last detail of the story before they put down a word. George RR Martin has also described it as a gardener vs an architect; someone who plants seeds and watches them grow vs someone who meticulously plans and then builds.

Pantser and plotter, especially among the less fanatic of the writing community, is generally seen as a spectrum. Many pantsers find a particular part of the writing process when they have to put together an outline and many plotters will find themselves deep in the weeds, far from the carefully laid plans of mice and men, and have to redraw the map. I am more of a pantser, who stops about halfway through my novels to outline the final sections. This gives me a nice benefit of both: I get to carve out a good path, but then I can look up about halfway and see where the road is taking me.

The way I build this outline is based off two techniques: the ‘South Park’ outline and. the Pixar method. Today, I will be covering the ‘South Park’ part.

Never thought I would use South Park as a base for good writing techniques, but here we are.

Outlining is one of the most important things to get right in your story first. It allows you to confidently say that something just works. This aspect of macro-storytelling is so important that I’ll be spending the next three weeks just discussing this and providing examples.

And to clarify before I go any further, I don’t particularly care for South Park. I don’t think it’s smart or intelligent television, or that it does anything other than attempting to offend all of my sensibilities at once. But I will say, their outlining technique, as described both in the documentary ‘6 Days to Air’ and in an improvised lecture given at the Tisch School in New York, works surprisingly well.

The essential idea is you lay out all the beats for a given script and see if you can put the words “therefore” or “but” between each beat. If you can, then your plot follows logically from beat to beat. If you can’t, then something isn’t logically following from beat to beat.

In a way, this rule can ruin other media for you, because once you notice this and become well-versed, you can’t not notice it. And it is so irritating to discover media that you’ve loved for years do not actually follow any sort of logical A→ B → C structure and are mostly just *vibes*.

Here is an example using a movie that follows this to the letter: “WALL-E.”¹

A robot works everyday through the garbage piles of his home. He spends his days working, watching old movies, and wishing for a companion.

But, another robot comes.

Therefore, he falls in love.

But she leaves.

Therefore, he follows her.

But there is an evil robot who wants to keep him away from her.

Therefore, he gathers support from the other people on the ship.

But the evil robot is powerful.

But they are able to defeat him.

There are some things missing with this outline. For example, we don’t have anything to do with the main driving force of the movie, the plant, or any involvement from the humans. But it does follow the beats fairly well and these missing pieces will show up when I introduce the Pixar technique next week.

It might be a useful exercise for you to see whether your story has beats that move logically. If you lay them out, do they follow one after the other? Is there a reason to go from one beat to the next?

Once, I was discussing this technique with a friend who said that she knew enough about language that she felt she could manipulate her stories any which way to make one of those two words fit between her beats. And to her I say, fair enough. You may be able to do it. But in your deep heart of hearts, you’ll know that those words don’t belong there. That is why, when the protagonist kisses the kindly insurance agent on page 215, you can tell something is wrong. There was nothing building to this moment, beyond you wanting to see it happen. And if that is your only reason, you should probably cut it.

Next week, I’ll share the other half of my rules for outlining as well as discussing ways of incorporating motivation and character into your outline.

1. I’d like to point out that I use he/him or she/her pronouns as this was clearly the filmmakers intent, even though robots don’t have a defined gender.