So, I know everybody uses Scrivener, or at least it seems that way, but I don’t. This post isn’t about comparing Scrivener to other programs, as I’m sure any writing software out there can do pretty much everything I’m describing here, I just happened to use WriteWay Pro, which is free and works for me.
I got to the end of my read-through of my novel thus far and ended up with a LOT of notes on what should happen in the final act, both main plot and subplots. How to get everything in the appropriate order is a lot harder, and this is the process I used to outline act 3 in my novel (and when I get working on my second draft, I’m going over the novel and using this process for the rest of it too).
This is WriteWay Pro. This is what it looks like when you’ve opened a new book, which I did for the purpose of this outline. It comes preloaded with 3 acts, but you can add more, and one chapter and one scene already started.
I started renaming the acts. What is named act 3 will be the final outline, Act 2 is where I put all ideas for the main plot, and act 3 is where all ideas go for the side plots. Those two folders are temporary of course.
So, I started with my list of ideas and started putting them in the second act folder. While all those things are main plots, the main plot could be divided into several small pieces. Each piece got its own chapter, and then each idea had its own scene. The chapters and scenes were named with this idea, sometimes the titles were long, but that wasn’t a problem.
Soon it was starting to fill up. I ordered the main plot stuff into folders mostly based on chronology, but in some cases based on certain character groups.
And then it was time to move everything into the actual outline. If there is one mistake I think I made early on, it was not being firm about chapter structure, but now I think I got it right. Each chapter HAD to have something important from the main plot happen, even if that wasn’t obvious and central to it. Every chapter needs to move the main plot along. In the outline notecard for plot (you get a lot of these notecards if you want to use them in WriteWay, but I mostly only use the plot and character ones), I wrote any details I could need later. But now I wasn’t just putting in ideas, now I was putting in actual scenes, so the act1 outline had a lot fewer things than the act2 main plot folder did.
As things were being added from 2 to 1, I deleted them from 2. There’s a sense of accomplishment in seeing things crossed off and eventually, Folder Act 2 was completely emptied.
And then I got started on the side plots. Anything that didn’t fit well into an actual side plot was put in the Loose Ends folder. The things in there were either very closely connected to the main plot, and so there wasn’t enough left to make a separate sub plot folder, but there were a lot of things in here that could be dealt with by having a character mention it in passing. Most of these things won’t need actual scenes, and in the end, one or two were cut completely, and another couple didn’t need to be dealt with until the sequel.
And in the end, this is where the finished outline ended up. Too many spoilers in the scene-titles to show it. But yeah, 13 chapters, in total 44 scenes. If I wrote full time, 40h per week, I could have it done in four days. But I don’t, so I won’t.
The next step of this outlining process is to draft up a detailed scene outline for each scene, but I do that by hand, because reasons.
