A Few Outlining Methods

Plotting can be fun

Last time I wrote about Plotters Versus Pantsers.

I almost always recommend outlining.

If you go down the route of plotting/outlining, then there are loads of articles and books about it. And yet, it’s often a source of confusion. I get asked about it a lot when I mentor writers.

“Doesn’t outlining take away the fun, Karl?”

Outlining can be like brainstorming: throwing in fun plot ideas, playing around, not worrying about the quality or logic at this stage. What’s not to love about that?

It’s an exercise in “What if … ?”

We are not listing every single thing that will happen. Just the major plot points and scene outcomes. When you come to write a scene or chapter, it’s still full of the joy of discovery. All you know is that the couple need to split up at the end, or the murderer appears, or the towering inferno starts. How it actually plays out is for you to discover. Your imagination and the characters lead you there and make the journey interesting, without derailing the big picture.

What an outline does is mitigate risk. It’s a kind of safety net to fall back on if you get lost, so you can always see the big picture.

And I tell you what is not fun ...

Writing something massive without a plan. Then realising a lot of the story doesn’t make sense, or you run out of ideas, or it starts repeating itself, or the plot leads to a dead end, or the excitement fades away and it all seems rather flat. Then the discovery writer often gives up, and starts something else, and repeats their mistakes in the next work.

Writing doesn’t need to be like that!

Writing doesn’t have to involve spending a year trying to fix mistakes in a book that grew without a plan.

With a good outline a writer can get a first draft written and the whole work edited multiple times while the author-without-a-plan is stuck in development hell rewriting the book and paying for editorial help to fix it.

The first author releases a finished, exciting book, and starts their next. The second writer is still stuck in the swamp.

(I’ve been there. It is sticky.)

We ideally want to balance creativity and efficiency. To have a final work that is cohesive; where the end and the beginning match up in a satisfying way that resonates with readers.

There are thousands of ways to do this. I’ll just list three which I have used.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

1. Mind map approach

Do it with software, or just on paper (or a blackboard!). You are trying to note what you know of the main story points, and brainstorm new ideas.

Use arrows! Connect bubbles! Show possibilities with multiple arrows! Add notes!

It may look mad and chaotic, but it is your starting point. Your design document.

If it is in software you can drag boxes around as you refine it.

If you do it on big sheets of paper, then rewrite it neatly as each version evolves. Rewriting (or redrawing) things helps to stick them in your mind, to reinforce them.

Photo by kenny cheng on Unsplash