Posted: January 4, 2024
When you think about writing a book, you may picture one of a few things. You may imagine someone sitting at a desk hunched over a typewriter or (for more modern thinkers) a laptop. You may think of someone pinning notes and images and charts on a big board, laying out a massive connecting world. You may even have a vague notion of someone speaking words into a microphone to take notes. However you imagine writing a story, or go about doing it, know that before the writing comes the planning.
But what is planning? What is an outline?
An outline includes many things. It’s not simply a character biography or a chart of what happens in the book from beginning to end. An outline includes all planning for the book, from the world to the characters to the storyline. As such, it will look different for everyone.
Creating an outline helps a lot of writers with their writing, though it may be a hinderance to others. It depends on what type of writer you are.
For those writers that flourish with the use of an outline, what they get out of making one is greater than the time invested. First and foremost, an outline is used to organize one’s thoughts. You can separate your plot from your characters, and you can decide what you want in the story and what is unnecessary. It will be unique to you, but essentially, you’re writing a story without writing the story. You create the skeleton, lay out how everything is going to go, before adding the meat.
Some more obvious benefits include:
That’s completely fine. Not everyone does. Not everyone needs to. There are some writers who work better without an outline to tie them to a strict sequence of events. The point is knowing yourself, so if you’ve never tried creating an outline before, try it, and if it doesn’t work for you, toss it. Write your own way.
What this type of writer is called is a “Panster,” meaning you write by the seat of your pants, straight from your head onto the page. You go through the motions, either with an idea in mind of where you want your characters to end up, or you have characters that take a life of their own and lead you through the story themselves.
Not everyone is good at this, but there are a chosen few who excel. Of course, no one’s story is perfect on the first draft, outline or not; editing and revision is always necessary to make a story shine.
Creating an outline is a little different for everyone, but the general premise is the same. An outline gives information about how a story will go. This could include your plot arc, individual character arcs, a list of events, and more. “Outline” simply encompasses all of these.
Pick and choose from the list below to build your roadmap.
As already mentioned above, outlines don’t work for everyone. There are those writers out there who work a whole lot better by just sitting down and beginning their story, and any problems they run into are fixed in later rounds of writing/editing. Those people, rather than writing everything down, tend to have the entire story mapped out in their head beforehand, or they trust the ideas to come as they write scene-to-scene.
Having an outline may stifle the creative process. It may also drain you of energy and/or motivation to complete the story. If you follow an outline too closely, it may make the story feel formulaic, so be careful not to plan out too many details.
That said, the writing experience is different for everyone, so—know yourself, know your audience, and know your story.
Top 10 Tips for New Writers
Top 10 Tips for All Writers
Top 10 Tips for Writing Captivating Stories
Writing Good Characters
Writing Compelling Villains
Pixar’s 22 Storytelling Rules
What is a First Draft? [writing]
What is Character Building? [writing]
What is Character Development? [writing]
What is a Timeline? [writing]
What is Worldbuilding? [writing]
What is Plot? [writing]
What is Genre? [writing]
What is Beta Reading? [review reading — pre-launch]
Tigerpetal Press is a small book press dedicated to publishing local authors and poets.