Book Outlines Are Not Magic

I am a dedicated outline user. I use outlines for cooking dishes (a.k.a. “recipes”), buying items for my home (a.k.a. “shopping lists”), and even keeping track of the work I need to complete for my clients each week (a.k.a. “task lists”). So it’s no wonder that I use outlines to write my books.

But outlines aren’t magic. You will still need to go through the process of writing and self-revising your manuscript and then having it professionally edited if your focus is on producing a high-quality piece of literature. Here are three ways in which book outlines aren’t magic, but are still pretty damn awesome.

Outlines Aren’t Magic, But…

…they make the writing process much less stressful.

Sadly, I hear people in the middle of writing without an outline utter these (or similar) words constantly:

• “I’m stuck!”
• “I’ve got writer’s block.”
• “I don’t know what comes next.”
• “I’m struggling to get through this scene / chapter / section.”

While I can’t guarantee that planning ahead will rid you of ever experiencing these things, I can honestly say that I don’t experience things like “writer’s block.” And, yes, for me, it’s directly tied to the fact that I plan my books before writing them. If you do find yourself feeling “stuck” or “lost” on a consistent basis, I’m just here to tell you that literary lockup isn’t a necessary part of the writing process. If you enjoy experiencing this and want to keep doing what you’ve been doing, fair enough. But if you’re ready to start writing faster, having an easier time of it, and finishing with a higher-quality draft, I encourage you to at least give outlining a solid try. Some people even go as far as to trash entire manuscripts instead of just stopping, creating an outline of what they’ve already produced and using that overview of the content to repair the holes. Since 2010, I have yet to run into a manuscript that wasn’t salvageable (and believe me, there were authors who handed me STRONG candidates for that label!), but you have to be able to step back and take a look at the entire forest before you can begin to fix it.

Outlines help you do this.

Outlines Aren’t Magic, But…

…they help you organize your thoughts.

If you’ve completed a manuscript and finished the editing process, you know that there are times when entire scenes need to be removed, chapters are out of order, or huge plot holes appear that you couldn’t see until you read the entire book/screenplay from end to end. This means a lot of heavy lifting regarding re-writing, rearranging, adding, and removing elements of your work (also called “developmental editing”) on the back end.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do the same kind of work by moving, adding, removing, or re-writing phrases and sentences instead of entire pages and chapters?

Well, you can. By using (you guessed it!) an outline.

Here’s an example.

BRAIN VOMIT

► A little girl lives with mom.

► There’s a wolf. A big wolf. Like a dude-sized one.

► Granny. Doesn’t live with mom and girl.

► Hunter. A HANDSOME hunter!

► Wolf tries to get girl. Why? He’s hungry? Yeah, keep it simple. He’s hungry.

► Wolf’s been out in the woods for a while. Why? Being chased by Hunter. Why? Hmm…wolf’s pack had been eating livestock? Nailed it.

► Hunter got the rest of the pack with some men from the village, but one wolf escaped.

► Wolf gets Granny, too, somehow. Figure that out later.

► Hunter saves girl and Granny and everybody lives happily ever after!

This kind of idea list can be whipped up in a matter of minutes. You’re getting your ideas down on paper / screen, without spending hours writing around in circles. Then, instead of the heavy editing of a lengthy narrative (as I described earlier), you can make a few adjustments to end up with something like this:

BASIC OUTLINE

►A little girl named Red lives with her mother, Amber, in a small village.

►Her grandmother, Rose, lives alone in the forest just outside the village.

►Amber needs to wait on someone to come repair the roof. Sends Red to Granny’s house with food and medicine.

► Red is excited to travel to see Granny on her own like an adult!

►Amber warns Red not to stop for any reason. Go straight there and come straight back.

►Meanwhile, Hunter and his crew of villagers have just decimated a pack of wolves that was eating livestock.

► Hunter realizes that one of the wolves got away (how does he know this? Paw prints? Body count?) and goes after it.

► Meanwhile, the wolf has escaped the hunting party for now. But he’s sore and starting to get hungry again.

►He sees Red walking in the forest, carrying delicious goodies. She’s not big enough to be much of a meal herself, but he’ll take what he can get. Hears Red singing about going to Granny’s house. A house means even more food and another human to eat! The wolf is able to speak and understand English.

► Wolf approaches Red in the attempt to get her to give him some of the food (something to tide him over until “dinner”). She says ‘no’ and let’s slip that Granny’s house is close by, just at the end of the road. Wolf can smell and hear the Hunter nearby, get scared.

►Wolf suggests picking flowers from a nearby patch for her granny and says he’ll leave her alone. Red goes to pick the flowers, Wolf runs ahead to Granny’s house.

And so on.

Notice how much more clear the outline is than the brain vomit? And since you haven’t written it all out yet, you may only have to look at a page or two of content to see the entirety of your concept (and pick it apart as needed!) instead of having to read dozens or hundreds of pages.

Now you can start organizing and putting some meat on the bones you laid down earlier. With each pass, each bullet becomes more robust. Phrases become full sentences. Sentences become paragraphs. Paragraphs become scenes. Instead of tossing a bunch of narrative onto the page and then having to find the diamonds in all that rough, you start with the diamonds (the core scenes / moments / ideas) and grow the story from there.

Relatively quickly, you’re ready to forge ahead with the narrative using the outline simply as a to-do list. I tend to get super-detailed with my outlines (yes, I know, I’m a dork), but you only need as much detail as works for you. If you can write an entire scene with just a single sentence as a prompt, great! If you need more, add more. Do what works for you.

DETAILED OUTLINE

► Chapter 1: Scene 1: Open with Hunter and villagers out searching for wolf pack. Finding them. Firing as they come charging. Hunter has one launch itself at him. He fires just before getting knocked out from a head-butt by the massive animal.

The above entry from my outline would then be turned into the first scene of my first draft (“rough draft,” “junk draft,” whatever you want to call it) of the book. Something like this:

Chapter One: Seek and Find

Hunter raised his fist and heard the footsteps behind him cease. In that last breeze he had been able to smell that familiar scent mixing carrion and wet leaves.

The wolves were near.

He pointed his index finger and stuck out his thumb, waving it slowly back and forth a few times. It wasn’t long before he heard the faint clicks and taps coming from men checking and readying their weapons for battle.

Hunter lifted his first three fingers and all the men began painstakingly careful forward movement. Hunter lowered his hand and followed suit. Within seconds the chorus of growls began. The beasts had to be at least fifty strides away, but the deep rumbles felt like they were nearly under his feet.

Almost too late, only the flash of yellow eyes truly registering in his vision, Hunter lifted his gun and fired. The sound only joined the series of other pops and bangs from throughout the nearby trees.

He saw a flash of teeth, smelled the metallic scent of blood, felt a heavy weight against his skull, and then the darkness took him.

Let the First Draft Begin

At this point, writing the first draft becomes exponentially easier. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t be engaging in any sort of revisions or editing. It just means that the time and energy you do put into your editing is going to be that much more effective. You’ve worked out a lot (again, not all) of the kinks before you even started writing your rough draft. That means you don’t write these problems into your draft in the first place.

Outlines Aren’t Magic But…

…they can save you (serious) money.

With a first draft that looks more like a third draft, by the time you hand something over to your editor they will have a lot less work to do. Whether your editor charges by the word or by the hour, this can translate to big savings for you.

A real-world example from my experience is a client from 2017, we’ll call her Toni, who brought me a 137,500-word (550-page) manuscript. That’s right. A wheel chock of a manuscript that spent about 90% of its time repeating itself and another 5% making absolutely no sense whatsoever. Pure gibberish.

So, my job after the deposit hit was to settle in to read, review, and revise this monster to shape it into something palatable to the average reader. It was a nonfiction piece, so my focus was on making sure that the core concepts were explained and clarifying examples were provided to help readers better understand what Toni was trying to say.

This particular client paid me just north of $8,800 to do this. In the end, I was able to boil the content (with examples, citations, analogies, and all) down to a much more manageable 60 pages. If Toni had used an outline, she could have brought me 60 pages to begin with and only paid $960.

So, ask yourself if using an outline is worth $7,000 of your hard-earned money.

As happens with some new authors, Toni had said everything she needed to say within those 60 pages, but she kept writing for another 490 because she couldn’t see the forest for the trees. With an outline, she would’ve had the overview needed to understand that what she wanted to say had been written already and she wouldn’t have repeated herself so much. With an outline, Toni could have saved herself more embarrassment (when I let her know that her manuscript was mostly repetition 😬), stress (struggling to churn out that many words over the course of several months), time (waiting on me to wade through the manuscript), and moolah (to the tune of seven grand).

Outlines Summarized

• Outlines are helpful for making the writing process faster, less stressful, more fun, and more efficient.
• You don’t have to write with an outline, just like you don’t have to refrain from using an outline.
• Do whatever works best for you, regardless of what I, your critique group members, your favorite author, or anybody else says works for them.
• Be open to experimenting with different book / screenplay planning and creation methods until you find what suits you best.

Happy writing!

LINKS

For more about outlining: Book Outlining Basics

For more about becoming a writer: Writerwerx

For more about outlining services for authors and screenwriters: Volo Press Books

For professional book and screenplay assistance visit VoloPressBooks: Books | Screenplays