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I'm assuming, Critch, that that outline you showed was a sort of generic outline, cos as it stands, it would fit almost anything. Personally, I outline a book similarly in the sense of creating a synopsis of two or three single spaced pages telling the story I want to tell.
The problem is that this is the first thing I do for the novel, and as a consequence I haven't developed characters yet. As GM pointed out, characters have a way of going in a different direction from the original plan and I think this is quite simply because one doesn't know the character yet, and a character has to act with integrity to his nature.
In the early days this often meant that the story moved in ways I had not expected which was interesting, but might go so far as to sabotage the story. It's getting easier now, since I re-use my characters and I'm getting to know them quite well. Nonetheless there are always new characters to throw a spanner in the works.
I've just started on a short, and here, too, I created the whole story first in outline, although in my mind rather than on paper. I'm on the third re-write now, so I think that I would have been better to have taken the time to do a proper synopsis first, although hardly two to three single spaced pages of course. The big problem I'm facing is that the story was supposed to be 1000 words for its original purpose, which I couldn't manage, and now I'm trying to re-create it at its natural length.
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