Outlines are simply plans. Just like you plan a meal for dinner, a trip, a marriage proposal, or a vacation. And, as with those kinds of plans, things can change. You can add stuff into the mix or take elements away. Something unexpected could arise and you have to adjust your plan. All of that is just part of the creative process. What a plan saves you from is excessive feelings of being confused, lost, or not knowing what comes next. This saves you time and headache regarding your plot, your characters, and the overall content of your piece.
What Outlines Don’t Do
There are some myths floating around about what outlines do. The first step in understanding outlines is to dispel these myths.
Outlines DO NOT box you in. One of the most common arguments against using outlines is that the outline is somehow magically restraining you from doing anything that’s not written in the outline. This is an example of you letting a tool use you instead of the other way around. As noted in the intro to this lesson, you can make changes as you go. If you get to the end of the outline and think of a character you want to add to the story, add them. If you get halfway through the outline and remember that you need a chapter dedicated to explaining a particular concept, add it. If you finish the entire manuscript and decide there’s a scene you want to add somewhere, add it to the manuscript then update your outline to reflect that.
You use the outline, don’t let the outline use you. Outlines are flexible, living documents that you control.
Outlines DO NOT crush your creativity. Outlines don’t have much to do with your creativity at all, in fact. At best, they allow you to focus more on the creative process. This may be because, instead of coming up with ideas and managing how to express them at the same time, you separate the two processes. During outlining, you focus on what’s going to be included in the book. During writing, you only concern yourself with how you’re going to present the info to a reader. Like trying to build a street as you’re driving down it, or trying to eat a cake as you’re cooking it, attempting to both create and edit ideas simultaneously splits your energy and focus, meaning you don’t give either process as much attention as you could.
Outlines DO NOT guarantee “success” (whatever that means to you). People outline horrible movies and unreadable books. People outline (i.e., create recipes for) vomit-inducing entrees and gut-wrenching beverages. Just because you use an outline, that doesn’t automatically mean that whatever you come up with is going to be of any value to your customers, is going to be easily / enjoyably consumed, or is going to win you awards or make you millions of dollars. Different people have different ideas of what “success” means in the literary world. To some, it’s getting their screenplay optioned. To others, it’s getting their novel into the hands of more than a thousand readers. To others, it’s all about them having written something they can be proud to call their own and even pass down to their heirs. Outlines help you organize your ideas. But if those ideas are not ones that can bring you whatever kind of success you’re looking for, the outline can’t force them to.
What Outlines Do
Now that we’ve cleared that out of the way, it’s time to take a look at what outlines are capable of.
Outlines CAN save you time. Because you have a clear idea of what will be included in your piece in the first place, you spend a lot less time writing the manuscript than you would otherwise. As noted earlier, because you’re separating the idea organization and idea expression processes, each one of them becomes easier and faster. The less time you spend writing, the sooner you can move on to the editing process. If you’re someone who is writing for money (and doesn’t mandate advance payment for some reason), this means you’re that much closer to payday!
Some of you may be thinking: “But doesn’t it take extra time to write the outline?” The answer is ‘yes,’ of course. But, this is an investment up front that saves a lot of time on the back end. For example, let’s say you normally spend six months writing around in circles and trying to pull yourself out of plot holes. If spending an hour writing an outline can reduce that writing time to two months by eliminating all that wasted effort, you’ve just earned yourself a writing process that is now 67% faster! Pretty good for a 60-minute investment.
Outlines CAN save you money. If you haven’t ever had a book edited before, you may not realize that the worse shape it’s in, the more it may cost you to have it edited. If an editor charges by the hour, it will take them more time to shore up a highly disorganized piece (meaning you pay for more hours and spend more money). If an editor charges by how much work they judge a book to need (based on a sample you submit to them), they may charge you more because your piece was written in such a chaotic fashion (you’re paying for more effort, so you spend more money). If an editor charges by the word, you may end up paying more when you don’t use an outline because you spend more time repeating yourself, writing scenes that clearly need to be removed, etc. This means your piece ends up much longer than necessary and you have to pay for all that extra “fat” (more words need to be edited, therefore you spend more money).
Using an outline means going into the writing process with a clear understanding of what will and will not be included, so that your writing is likely to be stronger and clearer and you are less likely to ramble and repeat yourself (i.e., fatten up your manuscript).
Outlines CAN make other parts of the writing process easier. Need a log line, synopsis, or blurb? Having an outline written makes all of these much easier to come up with. These are just a few more reasons that having a bird’s eye view of what’s included in your manuscript can be helpful. Your log line is part of helping you sell your screenplay. Your synopsis is part of helping you query literary agents and commercial publishers. Your blurb is helpful when you’re going indie and marketing and promoting a book on your own. Some people write their manuscript and then have to go back and re-read it and create a synopsis after the fact. By using an outline, you’ve essentially already done that up front.
Outlines are living documents that you have full control over. An outline can be a complex matrix of ideas and details or a simple list of three scenes or anything in between. An outline’s role is simply to make the writing process faster and easier for the author. Nothing more, nothing less. If you have been struggling with taking excessive amounts of time to write manuscripts, have been consistently getting feedback about how disorganized your work is, and regularly find massive continuity issues in your work, outlining is a great way to get rid of a lot of those problems.
Types of Outlines
Outlines come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few ways you could construct your outline:
- Index cards pinned to a cork board
- A bulleted list in Word
- Digital cards in Scrivener or Final Draft
- A list on a piece of notebook paper
- A three-column table in Google Docs or Dropbox Paper
Do whatever works for you!
Slim Outlines
A slim outline is about as simple an outline as you can find. It is literally just the beginning, middle, and end of your book. And these phrases don’t have to be exact. The first point is something that happens at some point in the early portion of the book, not necessarily the first scene. The middle is something that happens at some point between the beginning and end, not necessarily exactly 50% of the way through the book. Here are some examples.
Little Red Riding Hood
- Red goes to Granny’s
- Meets wolf
- Saved by hunter
Cooking Dragon Eggs: Level 1
- Differences in dragon eggs and bird eggs
- Working with dragon eggs only
- Easy recipes for dragon eggs
Memoir in Repose
- Always loved sleep
- Became a mattress tester
- Now a sleep guru and mattress mogul
A slim outline is fast and simple to create. Most people have this much of their book floating around in their brain, so writing it down isn’t a big deal. Expect to spend somewhere around five minutes to construct this kind of outline.
Using a Slim Outline
Once you have finished your slim outline, it’s time to start writing! If you don’t think this kind of outline is helpful enough, feel free to move on to a basic outline or a detailed outline or create something totally different that works for you.
For a slim outline, start by writing out the three sections that you’ve named. Feel free to do one segment per day or per week, depending upon what kind of writing schedule you’ve chosen.
Once you’ve got the three sections written up in a rough draft, start the self-revision process.
Basic Outlines
By answering two simple questions you can grow your outline from three sections to nine. Above each point, ask yourself what happened (or what the reader needs to know) just before that point. After each point, ask yourself what happens (or what the reader needs to know) just after that point.
EXAMPLE:
What happened right before this?
- Red goes to Granny’s
What happened right after this?
What happened right before this?
- Meets wolf
What happened right after this?
What happened right before this?
- Saved by hunter
What happened right after this?
If you have a third plot point that is the actual end of the book, then you can just write ‘The End’ and continue the process. Once you’ve answered the questions, you’ll end up with a 9-point list that would look something like this:
- Mom sends Red to Granny’s house with food and medicine.
- Red goes to Granny’s.
- Red stops when she hears a sound in the woods around her.
- She sees the wolf looking at her from a bush.
- Meets wolf.
- Wolf gets her to stop for a while.
- Wolf runs ahead and eats Granny.
- Saved by hunter
- Hunter walks Granny and Red back to Red’s house.
Now you have a much more detailed guide for your writing sessions. In theory, you could sit down and write one bullet point each day and be done with your first draft in less than two weeks. You can also keep unpacking these points. Turn nine points into twenty-seven. Turn twenty-seven into eighty-one, and so on.
With each round of unpacking, your plot becomes more clearly defined. Twenty-seven points is a good place to start writing. Those twenty-seven points can take you around thirty minutes.
Key Point: You don’t need to spend a lot of time thinking through a plot / content point. Just write down whatever comes to mind. Since you can change it later, you’re not locked into it. For example, if you write that a character falls off of a 40-foot ledge, but they are alive and well in the next scene, you’ll eventually have to figure out how they survived their fall, remove the fall scene, or insert some kind of supernatural abilities or happenings at some point. But, for now, you can just write the fall scene and then write the scene afterwards and you can fill in the middle later. Don’t let not knowing what takes place at this point stop you from moving forward with the outlining and even the writing process. If you write the draft and still have this plot hole, don’t be afraid to hand the problem to your developmental editor for repair. Their expertise will likely mean they can come up with a viable solution.
Detailed Outlines
For many authors, a basic outline is fast and easy enough to produce, but offers a greater level of support than a slim outline. But if you’re looking for a more intricate method of planning your novel, you may want to try a detailed outline.
This kind of outline involves thoroughly laying out exactly what is going to take place in each scene. When you use an outline like this, each writing session has minimal guesswork involved because you know exactly what’s going to happen and how.
Here’s an example using a three-column table format (but remember that you can format your outlines however you like, you have to be as big of a nerd as I am!).
| Little Red Riding Hood | ||
| Chapter | Section | Content |
| 1 | 1 | Hunter and his party are out in the woods looking for a pack of wolves that was sighted near the village (express this through dialogue). They hear nothing at first as they reach the spot where the pack was last seen. Then they hear pounding as some large, heavy animals come toward them. The largest wolves they’ve ever seen. The one headed for Hunter’s face dives into the air above him and he falls onto his back and blindly fires toward the animal before everything goes black. |
| 2 | Red wakes up to the smell of pancakes and bacon. She walks out into the kitchen, sad at seeing the empty third seat at their table (where her father used to sit), and snatches a slice of bacon out of the pan before her mother can slap her hand away. Mother chides Red for being so impulsive and impatient. Mother stares at the third chair for a moment as well and goes quiet. She serves breakfast to Red and sits down to eat her own meal. She tells Red that someone from the village is coming to patch their roof before the next rain, but she promised Granny she’d send her some medicine because she hasn’t been feeling well. If Red promises to go straight there and not stop and swears she won’t talk to any strangers along the way, mother will let her go alone to grandmother’s house with the delivery. Red excitedly promises, downs the rest of her food, and gets up to get dressed. | |
| 2 | 1 | Hunter wakes up in an unfamiliar place. He tries to sit up and feels the pain of his battered body. He’s at Granny’s house, a fellow survivor having dragged him there after the wolf he killed landed on top of him. He’s been out for a few hours. Granny brings him some tea and cookies and says he can rest as long as he needs to. But he wants to get going to make sure the wolves are taken care of as soon as possible in order to protect the village. He and his friend leave and tell Granny to stay inside until they come tell her that it’s safe. She agrees and shuts herself up in her house. The men walk away discussing what happened in the clearing. There were at least eight wolves and they went back to the clearing to find seven bodies. There’s one missing. It could be anywhere. They call for help clearing away the wolves and the dead. A few injured men are still laying in place, resting with broken bones and claw marks. Hunter sees paw prints leading back toward the village. |
Increasing Objectivity
Because you are the one coming up with these ideas, it’s difficult to be objective about them. But there are two ways to help gain more objectivity.
Take a break. When you set your outline aside for a few days, you can come back to it with a fresh perspective. It will never create the level of objectivity that a stranger would have, but it can be helpful. Upon review you may find ways that scenes can be rearranged, things that can be removed, or segments could be added. This saves you from having to do this level of heavy lifting with entire pages or chapters after the manuscript has been written.
Get an outline review. Just like you can ask a professional developmental editor to review and critique your manuscript (manuscript evaluation), you can request a review of your outline to help you avoid some common organizational issues new authors run into.
Though a review of your outline will likely be pretty cheap, if it’s too rich for your blood, consider asking one of your fellow writers to take a look at the outline and see if it makes sense and seems engaging to them. They might not have the same insights that a professional would, but it would still be beneficial, compared to revising your outline all alone.
After you get your feedback from your professional or fellow writer, make the changes you think make sense, ditch the ones you don’t like, and move on to writing!
Summary
- Choose an outlining format that you like.
- Create your outline.
- Take a break from it for 1 – 7 days.
- Come back to your outline and read it again from beginning to end.
- Make any changes you want.
- Get a critique of your outline by a third party (professional or colleague).
- Receive the feedback and apply the parts you agree with.
- Start writing your first draft.