When you decide to write a novel, the first phase is to outline your novel. Well organized writing has to undergo dedicated phases. Outlining the story, deciding the chapters, naming your characters, deciding conflicts in the story, pacing, and most importantly the climax. And after this what you get is the first draft which still needs to be updated. Your final draft will be the great work done by you.
Well, not all writers outline their novels. They just believe in their own way of writing the novel. Pantsers are the writers who do not plan anything before writing a novel. But the plotters are the ones who recommend outlining the novels. Every individual is different.
An outlining phase of every writer differs in many aspects. some use a highly technical way of outlining whereas some just use a few key points.
An outline can be done in start to end or in reverse order. Start to end is just the normal flow of your story and in reverse, you decide the end first and then write the events which are leading towards the end.
It’s totally up to you whether you want a highly technical outline or just the simple one which will keep you on track.
If you don’t have your own method right now, here is what you can do.
Two of the famous outlining methods are:
PCPT Method and Index-Card method.
So let us first talk about the outlining phase.
Why outline the novel?
It’s a good question if you are aware of the whole story of your novel. You can start writing the story directly, then why you should outline your novel? Well, the outline phase works as a planner or a storyteller. It will help you to follow the storyline without losing track.
Even if you know the entire story, there is a good chance to get distracted and you might end up creating plotholes. It is always better to have everything decided beforehand.
So, to avoid creating plotholes, distractions and confusion it’s better to have an outline.
How to outline the novel?
Ever told someone the story of an entire 3-hour long movie in 10 minutes? How do you do that? Mainly focusing on the important events in the movie, right?
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Write your story in less than 2000 words
Write the original flow of the story. Include only important events and try to map them all into a story in less than 2000 words. Do this in the same way as you tell the story of a movie, fewer words more content.
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Highlight the keywords
Grab a highlighter and mark the keywords. The entry of the protagonist and antagonist, important events in their past life(backstory), turning points in the novel, conflicts introduction and reasoning, death of the character(if any) and so on. Mark all these key events for the next step.
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Convert the key points into the index format
The events you marked in the last step are going to be the chapters of your novel. You have to decide which event comes under which chapter and where to end the chapter.
Make a list/index of the key points of your novel. Then decide where your chapter starts and ends, basically divide the points into the chapters. Write now, you don’t have to give the title to the chapters. Mark them as chapters 1, 2 and so on.
For example
Chapter 2:
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- The entry of the antagonist.
- The first-ever conversation of the Hero and the villain.
- Basic small conflict.
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Important turning points/conflicts
You have the entire storyline from the previous step. Now it’s time to make the story more interesting. In this step, add the highly important details from your novel. For example, the death of the character and the reason behind the death. The conflicts and why they are meant to happen in that particular chapter.
In the previous step and this step, add the details of every character’s entrance. Which character is going to appear in which chapter and their main purpose of being in the story.
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Remove the plotholes
Go through your outline thoroughly to spot the plotholes. Make sure you are not making any silly timeline errors or simple mistakes.
Make a word document of your final outline. Use any writing tool like Google docs and write down your outline using different color combinations for chapter title, events, characters and so on. This is the perfect way to organize your further writing process.
Now as you have a final outline, start writing your first draft.
More points on Outlining
- Outlining your novel is going to help you in many ways, however, it is not a mandatory step.
- You can use an entirely different way to create your outline.
- Take a good amount of time to create an outline but do not get stuck in that process for so long. Move ahead, you have more overwhelming things to do.
- Don’t worry if your outline is not perfect, no one is judging you based on that. The main result is the published novel and not the outline.
- If you feel like writing a simple outline, use the steps I have mentioned above. Those steps are sufficient if you don’t want a highly technical outline.
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