Outlining Your Book

Welcome

Welcome to The Story Stem Workshop, where ideas take root and stories bloom.

I'm an author, editor, ghostwriter, and book coach with a passion for helping writers turn ideas into stories. Each Thursday, I'll share mini lessons on plotting, character development, dialogue, revision, and the creative process, along with behind-the-scenes insights from my own writing journey. Many of the tips and tricks you will learn here are not groundbreaking, earth-shattering ideas, but they are all methods I have used myself or advised my clients to try, and they will often provide a different way of looking at writing and the writing process and will make writing a book seem less intimidating.

Outlining Your Book

Last week we talked about the idea of “just start writing.” This week we will break down how to come up with a loose outline so that you have somewhere to just start writing. In this example, we will be breaking down the writing process I use for all of my fiction novels and novellas.

First, I ask myself what the overall idea of my story is, my “elevator pitch.” In other words, if I had to explain my novel in one or two sentences to someone else, how would I do it? Currently, I would say: my WIP is about a woman who discovers her house is haunted by the previous residents. That is my basic plot.

I broke this plot down into three smaller categories: Part 1, the woman experiences some strange events in her own home. Part 2, she determines that the house is haunted by its previous inhabitants. Part 3, (spoiler alert!) she decides to stay in the house and live peacefully with the ghosts.

I work best when I have a small idea of what direction I want my story to go in, so I like to create a very loose outline with a one or two sentence summary for each chapter. My outline looks something like this:

Chapter 1: woman moves to new city

Chapter 2: she falls in love with a house and buys it despite its questionable low price

Chapter 3: she moves in and small, weird things begin happening

And then I repeat this process for the rest of my chapters. A typical mystery/fiction book is around 70-90,000 words, so if I go with a number somewhere in the middle, I would aim for 80,000 words and twenty chapters for a nice round number. There is no set number of required chapters, and of course the number of chapters will depend on how long you want them to be.

Some people prefer to work with a more detailed outline, and if you do, that’s great too. I prefer the loose outline because it gives me flexibility. With every book or novella I’ve written or ghostwritten, I’ve always come up with some idea that I think is absolutely genius midway through my writing, and then I either add to or change my outline a bit.

As we all know, life doesn’t just give us one problem to solve at a time. We always have minor conflicts that we deal with, and usually there are signs and events that lead up to any main event in our lives. What inner conflicts is your main character(s) dealing with, and what else is happening in her life? If she just moved to a new city, she could be lonely and homesick, or she could be living it up, having the time of her life exploring a new beach town and meeting her neighbors, thus neglecting unpacking or the job she moved to the new city for. All of these inner conflicts and minor events will also be worked into your outline, and this is why writing fiction is so much fun—it’s up to you to decide the fate of your character!

If, after writing your outline, you still have no idea where to start, take this advice at just the most basic level: Just start writing. Choose one scene and start writing. This doesn’t have to be the first chapter in the book. Choose one scene that you are excited about and write that scene. More often than not, the one scene you write, whether it’s in the beginning, middle, or end of the book, will get you excited about your book and might even give you motivation for the direction in which you want your book to go. Write whatever comes to mind. You can always go back and change, add to, or take lines out. We have to get that draft out of us and on paper so that we have something to make changes to.

Come back next week when we will talk about character development. Until then, happy writing!