A Collection of Thoughts on Outlining
This past week I finished up the planning for my next serial. Since I’ve been in outlining mode for a while now, and because I needed something to write about for this month’s blog post, I figured now was as good a time as any to talk about outlining and planning. So, welcome to the inaugural craft post on my blog, I guess.
Back when I first started writing, I placed myself very much in the “discovery writer” camp. I wrote my first novel basically off-the-cuff. Write the next sentence, and all that. Looking back, it’s probably the only reason I ever finished it. I jotted down some notes and ideas, but that was about it. I think I may have tried to outline, but deviated from it pretty much instantly.
Mostly because of the pressures of writing a long web serial, I’ve shifted to a fairly in-depth outlining process. Multiple passes, lots of drilling down to chapter/scene level planning, and lots of really digging into character. Note, I don’t care for the term “pantsing.” I never have, and I find it to be rather dismissive. The “gardener vs architect” is another distinction I don’t really care for, but the reasons are immaterial. So, outlining and discovery writing are the terms I’ll be going with here.
Over the course of planning this next series, and digging deeper into that process than I’ve ever gone before, I’ve sort of had a lot of thoughts about outlining and discovery writing. I think a lot of folks, mostly newer writers, treat them as separate and distinct categories. You’re either one or the other. I thought that way, at least at first. Eventually, I came to view it more as a spectrum, with a few people existing at the extreme ends, but with most living somewhere along that line.
Now? I’ve found myself arriving at a place where I’m skeptical of how useful this framing is at all. A part of this post is going to be me trying to clarify my thoughts on the matter, while also providing some (hopefully) useful insights about my planning process.
The Beginning
It might be a bit self-evident, but every story begins with an idea. Maybe it’s a character, maybe it’s just a cool image, or whatever. But somewhere, there exists a seed, and from that seed grows a complete and fully realized story. The trick is figuring out the best way to help that seed grow. The seed itself is largely irrelevant in the context of the finished story. For example, Legend of Ascension began with the mental image of a woman standing against a blood-red sunset in a field of corpses. Obviously, that seed is in the final story in a very real way, but the series grew to so much more than that.
The story seed is something I use in the early phases to clarify some important big-picture type things. Atmosphere, tone, the overall mood of things. In short—vibes. From here, I’ll begin working on characters, plot, and setting. If you hadn’t already guessed, I begin with character.
My characters are built using a method I was introduced to from James N. Frey’s masterful craft book, How to Write A Damn Good Novel. Not to turn this into a sponsored spot or anything, but it’s a book I believe every serious writer should own a copy of. I probably refer back to it more than any other craft book I own.
The technique I use actually comes from Lajos Egri, an early 20th century playwright. Ever heard the characters in a book called three-dimensional (or alternatively and worse, flat)? That comes from Egri. In his book, The Art of Dramatic Writing, Egri outlines what he calls the three dimensions of character: physiological, psychological, and sociological.
I’m not going to go into detail describing these dimensions (this post is about outlining, not character building), but I will say they give me a strong base to work from when figuring out my plot. In his book, Frey mentions that a good dramatic plot challenges a character at their maximum capacity. Put another way, success should be achievable, but difficult for your character, and they should spend the book operating at the bleeding edge of their abilities. This is why I use character as my starting point. The plot of a good dramatic novel (and web serials absolutely benefit from being written with an eye for drama) is meant to challenge your characters in meaningful ways. The best way to ensure you can do that is to have a solid idea of who your characters are before you start on the plot.
The Bones
Once the main cast characters is nailed down, I’ll come up with a loose concept for a plot. It’s usually pretty simple at this point—all it needs to do is orient me. Next, I’ll pick a story structure.
Different structures work best for different stories. Seven Point Structure (the linked Reedsy blog is a great overview of how to use it), is one of my favorites. I feel it’s particularly well-suited to progression fantasy. It’s really easy to map your core progression beats onto the seven points, and the arrangement of the mirrored beats around the midpoint ensures you have a robust middle section—something I think is particularly important in serialized work.
Keep in mind that not every book, story, whatever, is going to work well with the seven point structure. The Dawn Palace, for example, was plotted using Freytag’s Pyramid. How that book ended posed some challenges that seven point structure just wasn’t suited to. But Freytag’s, being a structure designed specifically for tragedies, fit the ending of The Dawn Palace perfectly. Definitely make sure you pick a structure that’s appropriate for the kind of story you want to tell. There’s a lot of them out there, and not all of them are right for every story.
So now we have a plot concept, and we’ve chosen our structure. Now we plan the major beats. These will depend on the structure you’ve chosen, but with seven point, there’s seven of them (duh). The article linked above details exactly what those beats do, and how to plan them, so I won’t go over that here. I will say that at this stage, everything is still very loose. Pinch Point 1 in my upcoming series is just a single, two-word sentence. The real job of this part is to give ourselves a high-level overview of the story. Major plot beats, summarized in a sentence or two, and arranged according to our chosen structure. Next step, write the blurb.
Now, the blurb that I write at this point is often going to be very different from the one that makes it onto Royal Road or Amazon. This blurb is for me. Its job is to provide focus, to nail down the core elements of the book, and to serve as a guidepost for the rest of the planning process.
The Meat
This is where things get juicy. (Pun intended, I’m not a coward). The next step is to take each of the major plot beats from my chosen structure and break each of them down into its own mini-plot. I typically use seven point structure for this, because you end up with forty-nine beats if the original plot was also using seven point. Fifty-ish chapters is a good length, and things always get a little off-plan during the drafting process, anyway.
At this step, the sub-beats rarely go more than a couple sentences. The idea here is just to keep bulking out what I’ve already got, adding more detail with each pass. For a concrete example, the Intro beat of my initial outline for my upcoming series looks like this:
Intro - Rika goes through her class selection, gets disowned and kicked out.
And then it got turned into this:
Intro - Rika goes through her class selection, gets disowned and kicked out.
Intro - Rika trains in the yard on the day of her class selection. Already choose to defy her dad.
Plot 1 - Rika stands before the altar, slices open her hand rather than pricking her fingertip.
Then finally to this:
Intro - Rika goes through her class selection, gets disowned and kicked out.
Intro
On the day of her class selection, Rika steps out into Blackstone manor’s central courtyard for her daily training. Captain Marin proposes something different to give her a taste of what’s to come—putting her up against a newly recruited Soldier.
Of course, Rika accepts. What follows is a fairly one-sided bout, that sees Rika soundly defeated. Marin points out she performed much better than anyone without her extensive drills and training would, and uses the opportunity to drive home the importance of experience and training once again.
Rika’s father, Maximilian, makes his appearance. His disapproval is obvious, and he orders Rika to the library. When she arrives, her tutor admonishes her and lectures her on the importance of her class selection. She spends the day in study, and then heads to the transporter room.
On the way she runs into her half-sister, Ariadne. The older woman does her usual song and dance of mockery and derision, and Rika snaps back as typical. They part ways, and she joins her father in the transportation room. He reminds her of his expectations, and they teleport to the Temple of the Watchers.
I’m only showing the first bits of the outline here to avoid spoilers, but hopefully this gets the point across. Each pass of the outlines gets progressively more detail. The story is bulked up from a loose, abstract concept to a broad strokes outline, then finally to a fairly detailed breakdown that goes over the entire plot, beat for beat.
This part is, it might shock some to learn, is some of the most fun I have writing. Once the basic structure is nailed down and I’m figuring out how to connect my top level beats, I am in pure creative mode. I’m letting the ideas just flow, and I’m really following the rule of cool to wherever it takes me. Tons of ideas, plot points, and what-if’s are getting thrown at the wall, and I’m just trying to figure out what sticks.
It’s honestly a lot of fun. There’s a raw purity to it that I’m not sure I’ve fully reached otherwise, even back in the early days when I would discovery write full novels. The other thing is that during this part of the planning, the structure starts to sink into the story. The formula becomes buried. The more I flesh things out, the harder than initial plot structure is to see. The story begins with a fairly rigid framework, but as more meat goes on the bones, the bones disappear.
The Point
A huge chunk of my current outlining process is informed by Rachel Aaron’s fantastic book 2,000 to 10,000. It’s a fantastic book for anyone looking to increase their word count, and it also really helped me build the foundation of my outlining process. The central thesis of her book is fairly simple—break up the writing process into as many discrete parts as you can. What this does is separate the different cognitive loads you’ll have to bear during the whole endeavor of writing a novel, and lets you address each of them one at a time.
The result is a lot of time and effort spent planning. But I’ve found the actual process of drafting the story to go much more smoothly once all that’s done. Is it a lot of work up front? Absolutely. Despite this, I’ve seen the total amount of time it takes to draft a complete arc for the web serial reduced dramatically. The first book of Legend of Ascension, for example, took about a year to draft, if I recall. The final book? Two months.
Of course, there were a lot of other factors that contributed to that drastic increase in output, but the biggest one was absolutely honing in on the process I’ve talked about here.
Some Stuff to Keep in Mind
It’s really easy to read something like this, get all amped up, and think you’re gonna go outline a 200k word book in a couple days, then write it in a month. Slow down there, turbo.
A really common refrain I hear from newer writers is some flavor of “I’m just a discovery writer,” usually coupled with, “I tried outlining and I just can’t do it/I don’t know how.” Fair. I get it. The first few (most, honestly) books I wrote were discovery written. I tried to outline. Early on, I’d simply deviate from the outline almost immediately, never refer back, and just go-go.
The more I wrote, however, the better my outlines got and the less I deviated from them. The more I wrote, the better I could map structure onto the stuff I was writing. The better I could formulate what I wanted before I wrote it. And of course, I had the big objection that everyone else has—outlines just feel too restrictive, too formulaic. I felt more creative just letting the words flow, and figuring out how to work them later.
Figuring out that I could get that same feeling of raw creativity from the outlining process really helped. Then, finding out the actual drafting part was just as creative really cemented the idea that this is how I’ll be doing things going forward. Sure, I’m not being creative in quite the same way—I’m not figuring out what happens. I’m figuring out the how. The phrasing. The moment to moment awesomeness that I crave in both the things I write and the things I read.
The big thing to keep in mind is that all this comes on the back of experience. Your writing process is just that—a process. It’s going to change as you mature as an artist. As you accumulate more experience, you’ll adopt more of what works and discard what doesn’t. Do you want to outline? Give it a shot. If it’s not easy the first time, THAT’S FINE. Like anything else in writing, it’s a skill. You’ll get better at it the more you try.
