I’ve seen a lot of posts about people having problems to outline their story properly before writing it and as someone who’s going absolutely insane if she doesn’t plan out everything before starting to write a multiple chapter fic, I thought I might be able to help a bit. Please note that those tips being helpful for me does not mean that you should do it exactly like this. But as far as I’m concerned, this method has always helped me so far.
Sounds obvious, but is necessary. Write every idea you’ve got for that fic down without plotting anything so far. The ideas contradict each other? Write them down anyway? You don’t know how to connect one idea to the actual story? Just write it down. Every random thought you have about that fic, whether it’s about the backstory of a character, the actual plot or the way you want to tell the story, just write it down.
2.1. Chronological order of the events
Now that you wrote down all your ideas it’s time to sort them. It’s important that you sort them in chronologically order of what’s happening and not when you’re going to tell it. Let’s say you want to include a flashback to when your characters first met. When you tell the story, some other things will have happened in the present, before you can get to the flashback of their first meeting in the past. But at this point you’re still going to put their first meeting before everything else, even when you’re going to tell it later. Some goes for background information. Your character used to live in a different country before the story started and it might only be mentioned once briefly? Write it down at the point where it chronologically happened. Just try to create a time line as concrete as possible, so that you will always be able to see what happened to your character so far, when you’re writing your story.
If you want to stick to canon it’s also important to include certain key moments in this chronological order. Just imagine you’re writing for a character from the MCU. Now the reader or your OC might have met them after the events of Age of Ultron, but the story takes place after Infinity War. Include that. Include every movie your character is part of or that has an effect on the events in your story and write down what happened to your character in between those events. And if you don’t want to stick to canon also write down at what point canon is going to change.
I’ve said in the brainstorming part that you should include every idea you have, even when they contradict each other. Now it’s time to clear that mess up. If you’re not sure about which of these ideas is the best, write different time lines with different things happening and see which one you like the most.
P.S.: It’s not important to figure out every detail yet. If you’re still not sure about how something is going to happen just wait, you’ll get your time to plan that.
3. Chronological order of story telling
If you’re going to write your story without any flashbacks or other time jumps at all, you can pretty much skip this step. Otherwise you now have to figure out at what point you’re going to start writing your fic. Did the whole story already happen and the main character is just telling it to someone they know? Do you start with something in the presents and then the main character has a flashback to the past and is then continuing the story in the present? Do you jump between past and present all the time or just once? Are you going to include the characters past as a full flashback or is it just going to be mentioned by the narrative? Just write down when you are going to tell what. But make sure that the reader is still able to understand what is happening, even when they don’t know yet how the characters ended up in a certain situation. Sometimes it’s important for them to not know everything so that you can still surprise them, but they shouldn’t be completely confused all the time.
Now that we got our time lines clear, it’s time to split everything into detailed chapters. Before you do that it’s important that you know how long you want your chapters to be. I always try to write between 2000 and 3000 words per chapter (I usually tend to 2300). It’s important that you don’t set yourself goals that are to high to reach. If you set yourself a lower word count per chapter chances are higher that you will actually fulfil it and won’t feel bad, because you couldn’t finish it. Now try to split the big plot into smaller chapters. Let’s say your time line looks like this:
• Character x reader have a date
• Character asks reader to marry them
• Reader thinks of how they met their ex earlier and isn’t sure what to do
Now you have to decide what you want to fit into this chapter. Will you stop after the proposal? Will you include the readers answer, but not the reason? Do you include the flashback, but not the answer? This is the point where you have to decide how much you want to include. You have to make it interesting for the reader, but should also be able to reach your word count goal. In order to do this, it will probably help you to think about the details. Where are they having their date? Does the place have a special meaning to them? What are they talking about? Depending on those details something can take longer to write now than you would have thought. If they’re at home there might not be that much to tell, but if they went to the place where they first met, you can include a whole lot of backstory, which will automatically make your chapter longer. So if you don’t want your chapters to be so long, you may should include a long flashback only in the next chapter. Just do this with your whole time line to see what you’re going to include in which chapter and with how many chapters you’re going to end up with.
P.S.: It’s totally possible that you realize while writing that one chapter takes longer to write than you thought and you can’t fit everything you wanted into it, then it’s of course totally fine to just split it up into another one. But if it’s not possible to split it up, because you have to tell all of it at once, you can also write one chapter that’s way longer than the others.
All you have to do now is start writing. Having all the details already planned out is really helpful for me, because now I can just concentrate on actually writing it and don’t have to worry about how all of this is going to connect. I will never reach a point in my story where I ask myself how I’m going to fix this problem or where I’m going with a certain idea. If I get a new idea while writing I can just go back to my “scripts” and see if it’s possible for me to fit it in without any further problems.
I really hope that this will help some of you, because every time I try to write something without planning it first, it ends up terrible.
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