system activated. continue.

(a non-suffering writer’s guide to structure, sanity, and staying mildly hydrated)

Hey besties. Let’s talk outlines. Specifically: how to do them without crawling into the floorboards and screaming like a Victorian ghost.

If just hearing the word “outline” sends your brain into chaos-mode, welcome. You’re not broken, you’re just a writer whose process has been hijacked by Very Serious Advice™ that doesn’t fit you. You don’t need to build a military-grade beat sheet. You don’t need a sixteen-tab spreadsheet. You don’t need to suffer to be legitimate. You just need a structure that feels like it’s helping you, not haunting you.

So. Here’s how to outline your book without losing your soul (or all your serotonin).

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🍓 1. Stop thinking of it as “outlining.” That word is cursed. Try “story sketch.” “Narrative roadmap.” “Planning soup.” Whatever gets your brain to chill out. The goal here is to understand your story, not architect it to death.

Outlining isn’t predicting everything. It’s just building a scaffold so your plot doesn't fall over mid-draft.

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🧠 2. Find your plot skeleton. There are lots of plot structures floating around: 3-Act. Save the Cat. Hero’s Journey. Take what helps, ignore the rest.

If all else fails, try this dirt-simple one I use when my brain is mush:

Act I: What’s the problem?

Act II: Why can’t we fix it?

Act III: What finally makes us change?

Ending: What does that change cost?

You don’t need to fill in every detail. You just need to know what’s driving your character, what’s blocking them, and what choices will change them.

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🛒 3. Make a “scene bucket list.” Before you start plotting in order, write down a list of scenes you know you want: key vibes, emotional beats, dramatic reveals, whatever.

These are your anchors. Even if you don’t know where they go yet, they’re proof your story already exists, it just needs connecting tissue.

Bonus: when you inevitably get stuck later, one of these might be the scene that pulls you back in.

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🧩 4. Start with 5 key scenes. That’s it. Here’s a minimalist approach that won’t kill your momentum:

Opening (what sucks about their world?)

Catalyst (what throws them off course?)

Midpoint (what makes them confront themselves?)

Climax (what breaks or remakes them?)

Ending (what’s changed?)

Plot the spaces between those after you’ve nailed these. Think of it like nailing down corners of a poster before smoothing the rest.

You’re not “doing it wrong” if you start messy. A messy start is a start.

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🔧 5. Use the outline to ask questions, not just answer them. Every section of your outline should provoke a question that the scene must answer.

Instead of: — “Chapter 5: Sarah finds a journal.”

Try: — “Chapter 5: What truth does Sarah find that complicates her next move?”

This makes your story active, not just a list of stuff that happens. Outlines aren’t just there to record, they’re tools for curiosity.

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🪤 6. Beware of the Perfectionist Trap™. You will not get the entire plot perfect before you write. Don’t stall your momentum waiting for a divine lightning bolt of Clarity. You get clarity by writing.

Think of your outline as a map drawn in pencil, not ink. It’s allowed to evolve. It should evolve.

You’re not building a museum exhibit. You’re making a prototype.

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🧼 7. Clean up after you start drafting. Here’s the secret: the first draft will teach you what the story’s actually about. You can go back and revise the outline to fit that. It’s not wasted work, it’s evolving scaffolding.

You don’t have to build the house before you live in it. You can live in the mess while you figure out where the kitchen goes.

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🛟 8. If you’re a discovery writer, hybrid it. A lot of “pantsers” aren’t anti-outline, they’re just anti-stiff-outline. That’s fair.

Try using “signposts,” not full scenes:

Here’s a secret someone’s hiding.

Here’s the emotional breakdown scene.

Here’s a betrayal. Maybe not sure by who yet.

Let the plot breathe. Let the characters argue with your outline. That tension is where the fun happens.

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🪴 TL;DR but emotionally: You don’t need a flawless outline to write a good book. You just need a loose net of ideas, a couple of emotional anchors, and the willingness to pivot when your story teaches you something new.

Outlines should support you, not suffocate you.

Let yourself try. Let it be imperfect. That’s where the good stuff lives.

Go forth and outline like a gently chaotic legend 🧃

— written with snacks in hand by Rin T. @ thewriteadviceforwriters 🍓🧠✍️

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

A note from Wisdom Kaye:

And I have a TERRIBLE feeling that since it includes queer stuff and a poly romance, it won't be palatable to mainstream publishers, though I am poking around for indie houses that might be open to that. I am absolutely unwilling to cut either the queer or poly stuff, I'm not doing a love triangle.

Amazon

Draft2Digital

Unfortunately, if what you want is to maximize both sale volume and revenue -- which is a very normal goal, I'm not taking a swipe at that or anything -- Amazon is probably the way to go. I write for fun and have a large readership already so I didn't necessarily need Amazon, and when I was on Amazon it forced me to price my books higher than I was comfortable with, which is why I backed out.

As an alternative to Draft2Digital, I use Lulu.com. The mechanism -- how you upload your book and what information you include -- is functionally the same, but Lulu doesn't charge a setup fee, allows you to edit your text multiple times without fees, and is slightly less expensive per-page. So if you don't want to deal directly with Amazon, Lulu is superior to Draft2Digital in my opinion.

Lulu will allow you to sell through other platforms such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc, but it's opt-in, it won't do it automatically, and if you do that it makes you price the books so that those platforms aren't taking a "loss" by their standards. So a book I publish on Lulu might cost $10 to print (that's Lulu's cut) and I can sell it for whatever I like above that on Lulu -- say I sell it for $20, I get $10 per book. But the same book would "cost" Amazon $21 since Amazon takes a much larger cut, and Lulu's retail price dictates Amazon's. So in order for Amazon to sell my book, I have to price the book above $21. If I price it at $22 and someone buys it from Lulu, I get $12, whereas if someone buys it on Amazon, I get $1. Lulu will never be more expensive than Amazon but Lulu will always take Amazon's cost into account if you hook them up together. (I just pulled numbers out of the air for that example, but for a real-life one, when I took one of my recent 6x9, 90K-word paperbacks off Amazon, I was able to drop the price from something like $18 to $12.)

Selling directly through Lulu without involving Amazon is thus absolutely the most profitable way to go except that you don't get Amazon's reach or universality. Buying from Lulu, people have to know it exists, navigate the site, and trust that it's legitimate. Buying from Amazon, someone might just...find your book, and people will go to Amazon just to browse, which they will not do on Lulu, especially since as a self-publishing site, Lulu is full of garbage bad books. So if you're publishing outside of Amazon you will have to do a lot more publicity and you will never have the same sales volume.

I will also say that when Lulu published my work to Amazon, something got truly fucked up -- I'm not sure who did it, but either Lulu or Amazon assigned someone else's book to my author name and fixing it was really hard because I wasn't the one who set it up, Lulu was. I couldn't just go in and remove the book, I had to talk to Amazon and then Lulu and then have Amazon and Lulu talk to each other. I think my author page on Amazon might still list a book by Kathleen Starbuck as one of mine. There's also some weird shit around adult content -- I believe to sell on Amazon through Lulu, you have to jump through some hoops if there's adult content by Amazon's standards, which I know includes erotica but may also extend to queer/poly non-erotic content.

So yeah, I think depending on your goals, Lulu is worth exploring, but if you want to make life easy on yourself probably the best thing to do is just hold your nose and go with Amazon. However, if you're interested in Lulu I'm happy to answer questions.

Ingram Spark, however, may they rest in filth, did used to charge $75 to set up your book and then $25 there after to make alterations to files. I think the setup fee was reduced, but they’ve found new awful ways to get money out of us (like $25 per 30 minutes to speak to a customer service rep on the phone if you need help and your issue can’t wait the glacial age it takes for them to respond to their free email) and they also made it so you need to contact a customer service rep to pull your work from their network. The quality of their books has also taken a steep nose dive since 2020. I had four books arrive without covers a while back. Just straight up naked in the box. And I had to fight them to get a refund. Madness.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

Forever Young - Mia Bergeron, 2023.

American, b. 1979   -    

give them a variety of exes. give them relationships that shaped who they are but did not last. give them people they tried very hard to love but it didn't work out. give them situationships that taught them things. give them something deep that was real but could not endure. things that hurt. things that ended amicably. people with whom hot passion cooled to warm affection and became undying friendship.

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

And I clutch the little warm tubes of blood and feel this sick person warming my hands and I think about how kind you might be and how I wish I could hold your hand and how badly, how really really badly, I want you to get better and stay warm and hold someone’s hand again.

And anyway sometimes it’s better to not think so vividly about the people I’m doing tests for. I’m a good little cog in a vast machine of people all trying to heal and cure, and my cog feels so fucking small sometimes. But I hope the blood I prepare for you helps you breathe better and laugh and wake up feeling well rested.

I wrote a whole reply and it got completely eaten! No draft or anything! Nightmare.

I'm skimming the basics you already know (read more, write more, stop waiting for inspiration, skimp on speech tags and use said as often as possible when you have to, spend as much time editing as writing) to give you an abridged version of advice I'm obsessed with that I call Total the Car. (I didn't coin this idea, but I may be the only one who ever talks about it. Forgive me if you've heard this lecture before.)

This advice references Ryan North's excellent Tumblr blog, BttF, on which he did a page by page reading of the novelization of Back to the Future. Ryan North is a very funny guy, and so it's an entertaining read, but it is also educational. Back to the Future is one of the tightest screenplays ever written, and the novel is a strange, meandering mess, made more so by the idiosyncrasies of its author and the likely fact that it was based on an earlier draft of the a screenplay. This allows us to compare and contrast the two works.

Early on in the story, Biff Tannen wrecks George's car. In the novelization, Gipe calls the car "nearly totaled," which causes Ryan to melt down; why nearly total the car? What value does the car have not being utterly totaled? The state of the car is mostly irrelevant. "Total the car!" Ryan says, on his blog. "You're the writer! You have the power! Total the car!"

I love this advice. I think writers often get bogged down in details like this; we're married to realism, or some research we did, or we think that going that far will be "too much," and so we rob our scenes of their own power. The phrase "nearly totaled" is not only weaker - it lacks the emotional gut punch - but it also raises questions where there should be none.

I think, when making a choice like this in writing, you should always err on the side of totaling the car. Kill the survivors. Burn the house to the ground. Make it harder on yourself. On your characters.

Stories don't happen in the almosts. They exist in the things that happen, the things that can't be undone. I love forcing people to go through a piece and circle every "almost" and "nearly" and "started to," and force them to write the piece that would have happened if there had been less restraint.