This is a good time to bring up the issue of whether a novelist should outline at all. (Screenwriters just about have to.) Many highly successful writers, including John LeCarré and Lee Child, have said that they don't. The just start writing and figure it out as they go. This keeps it fresh for both the reader and the writer. The latter sits down at the word processor every morning not knowing where the story will go next.
If you want to take this route, you have my blessing. But one of many obvious dangers is that you're going to have the problem I'm having with Passengers. You'll give your character a problem you can't resolve, which will mean a lot of rewriting, or even abandoning the project, at a great waste of time and effort.
Back to Passengers. The way the movie's writers tell it, he wakes her up and tells her it was an equipment malfunction, not something he did. Events go just the way he hoped they would. They fall in love and are blissfully happy.
For me, the predictability red flag rises again. The viewer will just be waiting for her to find out that he woke her on purpose and lied about it. Again, there is only one way for the story to go. They can't just keep on being happy.
Another predictability problem of a more subtle sort also arises. What the hero expects to happen--happens. He thinks this sleeping beauty will return his love, and she does. Here's a tip: whenever things are going the way your main character expects them to, your story is in trouble.
A credibility red flag also goes up. I don't believe that a beautiful relationship can arise from a completely selfish decision. Perhaps others do, but again, I'm the one who has to write this story.
So, unlike the writers of the movie, I've reached an impasse. For me, the developing idea has gone off the rails. At this point in the process, I try to cheer myself up with the thought that what appear to be blocks are messages from the idea about how it wants to be written. Guidance. I'm hoping I can use one problem to solve another.
I backtrack to my thought that maybe I should switch genres. This idea does not want to be a romance. It wants to be a black comedy. My guy is not a hero, but a selfish monster. So I'll give him his comeuppance. He wakes up his sleeping beauty, and she's not at all the way he imagined. They fight and get on each other's nerves so much that eventually he figures out how to put her back to sleep, and tries again with another woman. Who doesn't work out either. Woody Allen could do great things with such an idea. I'm almost surprised he hasn't already.
Unlike Allen, I am not a comic genius. I drop the black comedy notion. I'm going to stick with the romance, which means I'm stuck at the point where my guy wakes up sleeping beauty. I just don't see him doing it.
In my next post, I'll explain how one problem stops me but two problems are a breeze.