Congrats! I wonder if I might beg some advice -- I have loads of plot bits pop up all the time, but struggle to follow through with any of them because I suck at developing plots beyond the simplistic. I hear outlining will help with this, and I've tried but can't find an outlining strategy I like. Can you recommend one/some?
Okay. So I put this off for a while because I knew it was going to turn into an overly long and detailed post, but I had some time today and we’ve already talked about outlines a bit, so here you go:
Advice for Aspiring Authors: Outlining
Why You Need to Do It: Plotting and outlining are how you give your story a good narrative arc. If you don’t start writing with a pretty clear idea of your story’s beginning, middle, and end, you have absolutely no means of controlling the pace, and pacing is really important. You also have no way of knowing what kind of circumstances you’re going to need for your denouement and ergo have no way of ‘setting the scene,’ as it were. It’s like trying to put on a play with no props or costumes and actors who don’t know what parts they’re playing and who are saying their lines for the first time in front of an audience. Improv is fun but writing is not the place for it.
A lot of people who don’t like to outline think that outlining stifles creativity and adhere to the very romantic notion that you should be able to just sit down and let the words flow. But an outline doesn’t give you every sentence and every word–an outline just gives you the basic idea of what has to happen in a given scene to move the story forward. So outlining actually allows you to exercise two different kinds of creativity: finding the structure of a good story, and then putting that story down in words. If you do it right, outlining can actually be really fun.
But this is the tricky part. How do you do it right? There are a million different methods of outlining and different ones work for different people. I’ve made you a list of different methods, in case you have no idea at all where to start:
The Linear Outline. This is exactly what is sounds like. You record the events of your novel in sequence. You can use butcher paper, an online organizational tool like LitLift, or even just bullets in a Word document. If you like writing your scenes in the order they’ll appear in the story, this is probably a good way to do your outlining.
The Snowflake Method. If you only have a very basic idea of your plot, this is a good way to go. The Snowflake Method takes a simple plot and then exponentially increases the detail until your story blossoms like a Blooming Onion. It’s like a story fractal. However, other people can explain it a lot better than I can, so here’s a link.
Mindmapping. Picture Sherlock Holmes in his Mind Palace. Mindmapping is the practice of starting with one idea (usually on paper, though you can do this online with iMindMap), and connecting it to anything else that you think you might need for your story. You’re not going to get a linear summary of your plot this way, but it will help you flesh out and connect ideas, and have them all in one place.
The Tetris Method. There are a million different names for this one, this is just the one I made up. The Tetris Method involves recording scenes and information on note cards or Post-its–which you can also do electronically with CeltX or Final Draft. This gives you the option to create a linear timeline, and then shuffle all the events around as the need arises.
The ‘Fifteen Events’ Method. List the numbers 1-15 down the side of your page. On Line 1, give a one sentence description of how the novel begins. On Line 15, give a one sentence description of how the novel ends.Then go to Line 2, and describe what happens next after the beginning.Then go to Line 14, and describe what happens just before the end. Go back and forth from beginning to end until all fifteen lines are filled in.This exercise forces you to figure out how one event leads to another, and if you might be missing one of the key steps that will help you get from number one to number fifteen.
The Rule of Six. The Rule of Six says that for each apparent phenomenon, you should devise at least six plausible explanations. And it occurred to me that this can be applied as a writing theory–and there are two different ways to use the Rule of Six in the outlining process: Find six different explanations for any event or action that occurs in your novel which doesn’t have significant explanation or motivation, or come up with six different ‘what happens next’ scenarios when you get stuck.
Seven-Point Story Structure. This is a very specific method of modeling a story but it may provide a great jumping off point even if it doesn’t fit your needs exactly. See a more thorough explanation here.
The Question Method. This is one of my own invention. Here’s how it works: (1) Have an idea. The most basic concept of a character and a story. (2) Start asking questions. Questions the reader is going to ask/need the answers to. The biggest (and most important ones) are going to revolve around motivation and obstacles. Why is the MC doing what he does? (3) Answer the ones you can answer and move on. (It’s okay to leave gaps in your outline–you just need more bricks than holes if your wall, if you know what I mean). (4) Ask more questions. Once your story starts to take shape you can ask more–and more specific–questions. Lather, rinse, repeat. All you have to do is keep repeating steps two and three over and over again. Eventually you’ll get down into the minute details and have a pretty solid outline to work with.
Personally I use some combination of the the linear method, the Tetris method, and the question method. And eventually what I end up with is a rainbow-colored outline that looks something like this:
Of course, this isn’t going to work for everyone. But I find it’s really helpful to have scenes organized in such a way that I can easily move them around until they’re in a kind of order that make sense (this is a finished outline so they’re color-coded by chapter). And there’s very little on each card–I give myself a scene title and the setting and a one- or two-sentence description of what has to happen in the scene. I find this actually lets me be more creative rather than less, because it gives me the option to write freely without worrying about if the scene is taking me in the right direction. When you know what has to happen, all you have to worry about is the words.
Anyway, that’s a brief crash-course in outlining. Hope it helps.
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