Intro

When it comes to writing, I rarely ever go in without a plan. For shorter things, like flash fiction and short stories, that plan might just be a basic idea in my head of how events are going to play out but, for longer projects like novels, I usually need more than a basic idea to help keep me on track. This is why outlining has always been a vital part of my novel writing process.

While I’ve tried—and will probably continue to try—numerous different outlining methods, I always wind up falling back to my original way of doing it. It’s simple and straightforward, a summary of all the big events broken up into either scenes or chapters (that varies sometimes), all in the order it will happen in the book. 

But, before I can outline, I have to figure out what all those aforementioned big events are first. For that, there’s only one thing to do…

Brainstorming

The first step of every writing project I’ve ever done is brainstorming. This is the stage when I start really trying to pin down the plot and figure out how all of the major plot points are going to play out—so it’s important that I do it before I even consider starting to outline.

I always start out with a basic concept for every story I write, but it’s never very concrete at first—usually, it’s something simple like “a farm girl saves her town from an evil dragon”—which is a great start, but not really enough for me personally to build a whole story off of. Like, how does she save the town from the dragon? What’s the dragon doing that makes her have to save everyone from it in the first place, and why is it doing it? Who is this girl anyway? What’s her life like before the story starts? These are the sorts of things that I generally figure out during the brainstorming phase.

Once I know what most of the important details are, I then try to put them into a plot structure—such as the Hero’s Journey or the One Page Novel (if you want to learn more about these, check out Reedsy’s article about the Hero’s Journey and E.A. Deverell’s article about the One Page Novel—which I basically use to outline the outline. The structure helps me look at the story in a more technical way and also helps me see if I have to add more plot points to make everything work the way I want it to. After I’m done, I usually have a pretty firm grasp of how the main plot line is going to play out and know what the major scenes are going to be.

For some people, the structure is the only sort of outline they need and, for shorter things, it’s usually enough for me too—for my Rise of the Oathsworn books, for example, I’ve so far only used the One Page Novel to outline them, and I haven’t needed anything more detailed yet. But for full-length novels I need an even more detailed rundown of events, with pretty much every scene planned out ahead of time rather than just the major ones that the story structure focuses on. So, for that, I move on to the next stage.

Outlining

As I mentioned earlier, there are a zillion different ways to outline a novel, and some of them vary greatly in detail. While my way definitely isn’t the most detailed I’ve ever heard of, it certainly leans more in that direction. 

Most of the time, I outline by chapter. I write up the events of one chapter and explain to myself exactly how they play out, so that I don’t have to worry about figuring it out while I’m actually writing it, then move on to the next, and the next, and the next, until I’ve got every chapter of the book planned out. 

I’ve seen a lot of talk online about how you shouldn’t outline by chapter because it might make everything feel too episodic. But, while that’s definitely a risk—and something that I’ve encountered before in my own writing, so I can confirm that it is certainly a possibility—it’s really not that big of a problem, because it’s so easy to fix. If I notice that too many chapters end in too convenient a place—something like the POV character going to sleep is probably the easiest example I can think of, or just anything where all of the main conflicts of the chapter have been resolved—I just change where the chapter in question ends. Maybe what used to be the end of the chapter is now the start of the next chapter or, if it’s a long chapter, I find a way to split it into two. Either way, it’s an easy fix that can be done at pretty much any stage of the process, though I usually try to catch it while I’m outlining, because that’s usually when it’s the easiest to notice.

While I don’t always outline every single scene in a chapter, I do try to include all the most important things that are going to happen in it—whether it has to do with the main plot or one of the subplots. By the time the outline is done, I know how every plot line is going to play out—or, at least, I know enough to get started. I almost always wind up changing things while I’m doing the actual drafting but, even if I don’t end up sticking with what I have in the outline in the end, it’s always useful to have it there to refer to if I get stuck. 

Although it’s less important than most of the other stuff that the outline helps me do, another thing it does is help me get an idea of how many chapters the book is going to have. And having a predetermined chapter count makes it easy for me to keep track of my progress and how much more of the book I have to write, which is always nice to know.

Outro

So, that’s a wrap on this one. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at this particular part of my process. Thanks again for reading, and be sure to come back later this month for the March book recommendation!