Outlining for beginners, pantsers and chaotic writers
With NaNoWriMo coming up, maybe you want to have a NaNoPlanMo first.
This post is for you if…
… you want to try outlining, but don’t know how to begin.
… you never finish a first draft because you don’t know how to proceed or how to write a long story.
… you tend to forget certain characters are present in a scene.
… you don’t want to write your scenes chronologically, without losing track of your story.
… or you often write yourself into dead ends or have to fix major plot holes or pacing problems after finishing your first (or second, or…) draft.
First of all, this is not a plea against pantsing. If you’re a happy pantser, pants away, my darling!
1. So, first, let’s decide what story to write
I’m a big fan of the notion “write what you love”. If you don’t love your story, why write it at all, right?
Make a list of the elements or tropes or character types you like. For example:
queer character cast
and there was only one bed
faulty magic with bad consequences
punny names for minor characters
Now, make a list of things you don’t like. This helps me to stay away from them, especially if something is prevalent in my genre. For example: dragons, romantic stalking, politics, epic battles, the logistics of travel.
2. Now, make up the general storyline.
Look at your love list and turn them into a story in a few sentences. Don’t write more than a page, you’re still kindling your outline.
For example: An Asian girl is sent away by her parents for something she did in the first chapter. She thinks it’s a punishment and she assumes she’ll never see her parents again. But who is this uncle Bonkel she’s being sent to, and why has she never heard of him? Turns out, uncle Bonkel is a wizard and she’s gonna be his apprentice. He’ll introduce her into the feisty, fickle world of magic. But he already has an apprentice, a hot bi girl with the most gorgeous Afro hair. And, uh oh… there only is one bed…
This is just a quick example, I’m sure you can come up with something better. (Although… Can someone write this for me? ^-^)
3. Turn this tiny idea into an outline
Write out the different elements on post-its, or in a grid, whatever method of visualisation suits you best. I used post-its at first, so that I could swap things around, and when I was happy, I transferred it into an online excel that I can check where-ever I’m writing.
In this case, the example story breaks down to these elements:
Something happens, in hindsight we’ll see that the girl has used magic but she doesn’t realize it just yet.
Her parents overreact, giving her the impression she did something bad, and send her away to uncle Bonkel.
Who tf is uncle Bonkel? she wonders, as she is packing her stuff, never to return home again.
The reader gets to know the girl better during the train trip to uncle Bonkel, because of course, she doesn’t get there easily. Things go wrong, of course, what would you have thought?
And more things go wrong, but she deals with it, and the way she deals with it shows us what kind of a person she is.
She arrives at uncle Bonkel’s house and he is… weird.
She gets a glimpse of the dark goddess, a first impression, but they aren’t introduced yet.
Uncle Bonkel sits her down for The Talk: Yes, magic is real, and apparently she did magic. Whaaaaat?
Then she gets to meet the dark goddess, who turns out to be uncle Bonkel’s other apprentice, but apparently she’s less keen on sharing, both Bonkel’s mentorship and her bed.
Wait, her bed? There’s only one bed…?
...
And so forth. You get the picture. You can write big or small events on your post-its, even great parts of dialogue or random lines you came up with.
My story is more complicated than this, so I ended up making a grid for each storyline and each character (group), so I can keep track of who needs to do what when.
If you’re finished making your outline, check if you didn’t…
... leave a character dangling
... raise questions you never answered
... or start a storyline that you haven’t finished
In this example, if the girl wonders in the beginning why she never heard of uncle Bonkel, have you given an good explanation for this at some point? And if she thinks she’s never coming home again, have you included a scene in which she goes back to her parents? And is it clear to the reader why the girl thought her parents were angry when they weren’t? Have you explained why her parents don’t just sit her down and tell her about magic themselves? Or why she didn’t know about magic before the thing happened?
4. If you like, you can take this outline further to get a grip on the story’s pacing.
You can decide which events are most important and put them on a narration timeline. Afterwards, you can place the minor events around them.
To continue with my example, I decide that the scene in which she arrives at uncle Bonkel’s house will be at 20% of my story, at 40% there’s a first major magical disaster, and the first time she kisses the dark goddess will be at 50%, but of course they pretend like nothing happened, so the first time they admit there is something happening between them is at 80%. In between these events, I will play with the growing love between the girls and show them learning the fickle art of magic.
An average novel of this genre is about 75,000 words long. (You can google the average lengths for each genre.) If a total of 75,000 words is my goal, it means I need about 15,000 words (20% of 75,000) before she arrives at uncle Bonkel’s, and the first magical mishap is after about 30,000 words (40% of 75,000), etc.
From this, you can deduct how long each (post-it) element needs to be, or if you need to add a filler element, or if you need to move a post-it to a different spot.
There’s no need for your scenes to be all of the same length, of course. In my example, the scene where she gets the first glimpse of the dark goddess is much shorter than the next scene, where uncle Bonkel sits her down for The Talk.
I would advise you not to flesh out your outline too much. You don’t want to take away the creativity from writing your first draft. I usually only use one-sentence descriptions for each scene, so that I can still surprise myself while writing. This way, you’ll also avoid not finishing your outline because you get too carried away and you want to start writing before you’ve finished your outline ^-^
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Okay, that’s it! Go forth and write, my darlings!
(BTW: This post describes an outline which still gives you loads of leeway. If you want to try a more structured approach, maybe my post How I turned an idea into an outline is something for you. This method gets your pacing right from the start by showing you what kind of elements go where on the narration line. The rest is pretty similar.)
I hope this was helpful. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions, and happy writing!
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