Hello! I know you're doing skele and right now but I just wanted to ask how you outline your fics, personally, I can't outline my stuff if my life depended on it and I was wondering if you had any tips or advice on how beginners should outline their stories. Love your stuff <3
Disclaimer, I don’t know how useful any of this will be, for a beginner or otherwise, because every creative brain works a little differently and there’s always at least some trial and error while you figure out what works for you, specifically...
But that said!
My outlining process boils down to throwing everything on the page and refine from there until it’s polished.
I start by writing down everything, all the ideas and concepts and daydream fodder that was previously just floating around in my brain needs to go down somewhere, usually in a word doc but in a pinch, I’ve definitely used the Notes app on my phone--because let’s face it, in the middle of the night when you’re supposed to be sleeping is one of those times that inspiration and cool ideas sometimes run rampant and I’m not gonna get all the way up to get my laptop but the phone is right here and this needs to get written out.
Obviously, if I just left it all like that, I’d have a very messy list of Random Stuff and no idea what to do with any of it, so from there I try to organize. Move things around into an order that kinda makes sense, like Thing X happens before Thing Y, and Thing Z actually can’t happen until at least Thing Y has happened, stuff like that.
I find that step also helps for figuring out the bits you might be lacking in the early stages. You can see all the points laid out in some approximate order and if it looks something like ‘Point A, Point B, Point D,’ your brain will often be able pick out that there’s a gap there that doesn’t work, and that you need to come up with a Point C to bridge it.
“I’ve connected the two dots.” “You didn’t connect shit.” “I’ve connected them.”
But once you’ve got that, you’ve got at least a bare bones outline, and that’s really the framework for everything!
At that point, for me, it’s just a matter of coming back to it a few times and expanding it, so in the super-basic outline, you might just have something like ‘first date, bonding & flirting.’ When you come back to it to add more, you might decide what kind of date they’ll be having, what they might talk about or how they might flirt with each other, maybe a few actual lines of dialogue if you happen to think of anything good.
I do this with every chapter I think a fic is going to have before I post any of it, because by then I feel like I have a solid enough basis to follow through on the whole idea with, and there’s only two steps left for the outline after that: pre-writing and writing.
The pre-writing step, I try to tackle within a week of when I know (or hope to know) that I’ll have time to write, so everything’s fresh. Basically, though, pre-writing is just taking one of the already semi-fleshed out chunks of outline and making it even more detailed. You’re more or less making an outline of this one bullet point on your outline, taking the basic concept (‘first date, bonding & flirting’) and all the extra details you added on (where they’re going, what they’re saying, etc) and arranging them/filling in any blanks you can find until it’s pretty much a rough cut of what the chapter will look like.
I think about a lot of framing stuff in this step, like how the chapter is going to open and how to segue it into the stuff that’s supposed to happen, body language and facial expressions, more dialogue/banter, setting up so that you’re on track for flowing into what the next chapter is supposed to be.
Right around here is also sometimes where you might realize you can’t do that effectively and there might’ve been a transition chapter left out of your original outline because you hadn’t yet realized you need it-- not a big deal, it’s happened for both of my longer fics at least once (FGTC was supposed to be 10 chapters, DL was supposed to be 20, oops)--but you can sort that out with a brainstorming session or two at some point and just doing what you did for all the other chapter outlines to add one or a few more.
But then, once you’ve done all that, the only thing left is the writing step! Which is to find a time (or a few times) that work for you in terms of energy and other RL obligations to just sit down and write it. By then, you probably have a very detailed outline going on, so it’s just a matter of refining all those notes you made about how everything happens, in what order, who says what, etc, etc into actual sentences in your narrative.
Read over it again once you’re finished, maybe run it by a beta if that’s how you roll (I’m the worst combination of impatient and sensitive, so I just read it over twice instead! XD), and then it should be ready to post wherever you so happen to post.
...But like I said, that’s just my method and General Process, it’s totally possible that you might find a different way that works for you better.
I hope some of that rambling mess was helpful to you, and good luck with any future projects! <3
