I'm a novice outliner. I am normally too impatient for them. But my next novel (not NaNo) requires me to know what I'm doing before I start. So what I'm going to do is not so much an outline, but a treatment. A bare bones play-by-play version of your novel. "Johnny does this, which causes this other thing to happen. He struggles to solve the problem, but remembers something he learned from his father when he was young, which at the time seemed pointless, but it turns out to be the exact solution Johnny needs." And so on, for the entire novel.
Write the entire book in 20 pages or so, keeping to the bones of the plot. No pretty words. No imagery. Just write what happens and make it pretty later.
If that works for you fine.
If I do that, from experience, one of two things happen;
a) I can't actually get up the motivation to write the novel, because at some fundamental level I have
already told this story.
b) When I start writing the novel, I find out and figure out some stuff from the first three chapters or so that reveals me to be wrong in he outline, and the story diverges ever more thereafter into something different.
I am aware of a number of successful published authors for whom this is the case, so this is a legitimate way to be. I think my advice would be, if you suspect that you might be one of them, by all means experiment with outlines and see if it helps, but if there's a chance that outlining might kill your stories, don;t text it with the stories you most care about.
