2 Ways to Outline Your Book- Method 1: Open Outline

Outline your story can be a pretty intimidating task for writers. Now your story is evolving from just a basic idea to a story. This stage of the writing process will involve you to understand the beginning, the middle, and end of your story. In the previous article on how to plan your novel, I talked about the 5 W’s of writing. This stage is asking you “How”? How do you characters get from point A to point B? How do your characters evolve in the story? How will your story end?

There are two different methods that I use when outlining my novels and stories. One method is very simple if your story is still not fully coming together yet and the other is for those who can visualize the scenes and interactions in their stories. Either method can be used when outlining your novel. For the sake of length for this article, I will only be sharing the first method.

Method #1: Open Outline

This method allows for writers to loosely outline their story and have more freedom when working on their first drafts of their stories.

• Who are your Primary Characters?– This is anyone who has a main role in your story. Your protagonist, your antagonist, your companions, your henchmen- pretty much anyone who is a direct part of your story’s plot. Here you will want to start developing your characters a little more. You can do this by including some basic character traits and flaws to give you a rough idea about your character.

• Who are your Secondary Characters?– This is everyone else that your characters might meet. Maybe it’s their parents, siblings, mentors- anyone who is in the story and doesn’t directly influence the plot. The importance of having these little characters is that perhaps they might become important later on, or maybe these are people who are going to die in your story. Maybe these people are there to add realism to your story. It’s hard to use a cast of child characters and not mention the fact that they have parents who are working behind the scenes, am I right?

• Where is your story taking place?– This ultimately depends on how much you described your setting in the previous step. If you simply listed names of places, then in this step you will want to think of a description for your setting. Of course, if you did some more world building in the first step, then all you need to do here is list the places again.

How does your story begin?

Now we are getting into the meat and potatoes of your outlining. Deciding how your story should begin is something that is daunting to many writers. The key here is to consider how far back you want your story to begin. There are several options that I prefer to use:

Description- This is nice if you want to focus on your world building. You can start with a nice description of the weather, the town, the home, or even the task that your character is doing.

Dialogue- You can also choose to jump right into your character’s perspective by starting with dialogue. This is good for those who want to write in more of a present tense and some life altering force or event can take place right afterwards. Or you can introduce your character through this dialogue.

Different Perspective- This is great if you want to hint at a greater piece of your plot for your characters to describe later on. This is usually written in a different time or place far from the current time of your main character. This is good if you want to introduce a problem early or if you want to write a prophecy for your characters to follow.

Those are just a handful of ways that you can begin your story. As for the rest of the beginning portion of your novel, keep in mind that this is considered the exposition to your story. You want to try to introduce the characters, setting, and conflict in this stage. For your outline, you can simply list these occurrences. I prefer to list the events individually when I outline.

How do you work through the middle of your story?

This is where you will want to consider how you progress your plot forward and what sorts of conflict your characters will face along the way. So then you take the main things that you want to happen in your story and simply list them out. You can also note any important character developments and important bits of subplots here as well.

If you are not sure how you want the middle of your story to progress, then simply leave a sentence here that describes the basic idea of your story and let the story flow when you write your first draft. It depends on how much time you want to spend working through this step. 

How to end a story?

This ultimately depends on whether or not your story is part of a series. If it is a piece of a series then a cliff hanger or ambiguous ending is one that I would recommend. Otherwise, providing some closure to the plot would be nice, but not required. 

Keep in mind that there is supposed to be some sort of resolution to the conflict within the book, even if it continues to a different book. If you drop your book without any sort of resolution to the current plot or conflict then we’ll have an issue like in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where there is all this build up and then the book just ends (granted, Charles Dickens passed away before he could complete it). We as readers are forever left guessing who the killer was and that is something that we want to avoid in our own work.

The outlining process takes a lot longer than the initial planning of your work. However, this particular outline is designed to be quicker and a lot less detailed than the second method. Personally, I prefer this method when working on my short stories since it usually takes me a few hours toa few weeks to outline them.

Thank you all for reading this article, I hope that the template down below will be helpful and, if interested, go ahead and watch the Youtube video I made about this topic. There might be some more helpful tips in it that I didn’t go over.