How To Outline A Novel
Turn your story ideas into a blueprint for your book.
There are two types of authors:
Plotters - Create an outline before writing.
Pantsers - Don’t create an outline before writing (write by the seat of their pants).
Think of these labels as the two ends of a writing spectrum.
Some plotters will prepare incredibly detailed outlines for their stories. Other plotters might only jot down some notes about each chapter.
Some pantsers will sit down in front of their computers and begin typing their story. Other pantsers may have an idea of the story’s ending and where they are headed.
Here’s a good way to determine which type of writer you’re closest to:
Think back to your time in school.
When you had an essay assigned for a class, how did you approach it?
If you’re like myself, you always made an in-depth outline to avoid writing yourself into a corner. Knowing this, I determined early on that I’d write better stories if I initially took the time to develop some kind of outline.
🚨 Tip for new writers:
Even if you think you’re a pantser, try to develop some kind of outline.
You don’t want to slave away on a story and find out halfway that you have no idea how to wrap things up.
Save yourself time (and potential heartbreak) by at least writing up a loose outline. You don’t even have to follow it if the story takes you somewhere else while you’re writing. I’d suggest at least thinking up an ending so you know where you’re headed.
If you’re a plotter and entering the outlining stage of your novel, you probably have tons of notes about your story.
Last week I shared a helpful method for organizing your story ideas:
It’s time to flip to a new page in your notebook and begin creating an outline.
(This also could be done on the computer or by writing on sticky notes and pasting them onto a wall.)
You will probably go through several different outlines before feeling confident enough to start writing your novel. That’s okay. It’s all about becoming familiar with your story and getting it organized in your mind.
List out your chapters:
Start with chapter 1 and list out the various chapters that will make up your book.
There should be five elements written under each chapter:
Setting
Time of day
The basic action of the scene, written as a simple declarative sentence
Example: “Bob confronts Helen about her secret.”
Emotional change
A scene must have something happen that causes the emotional tone to change drastically either from + to - or from - to + just like the opening and final images of story.
The conflict
Blake Snyder describes conflict like this: As the lights come up, two people walk into a room from opposite doors, meet in the middle, and begin to struggle past each other to reach the door on the other side. They each enter the scene with a goal and standing in their way is an obstacle.
In other words, why can’t your character achieve what they want in the chapter? What’s stopping them?
You can get crazy and add as much detail to your outline as you want, but I’ve found that those five elements are essential for me.
For more complicated chapters, I’ll type my initial outline into a Scrivener document and make bulleted lists of what happens.
It’s really up to you. There is no single process that writers take for creating a novel. The trick is to understand how you work best.
If you want to learn more about shaping your story, check out my post about Blake Snyder’s 15 beats of a story:
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