#outline example

I get a lot of asks about my outlining process, so. Behold! A side-by-side of all the writing stages of Chapter 8! 

Le GDrive Link

Here’s an example outline I wrote for my episode of the 2nd season of Idiot Sitter. The ep ended up being entirely re-written (so hopefully this is legal for me to post -- hi Comedy Central!!), but should still give you an idea of how an outline could look.

While we’re on the outlining subject, here’s the entirety of Book One back when it fit on two-and-a-half pages. This is the “messy” outline, aka not broken into chapters yet, but you can see which scenes/events the rest of the book was built around. 

You can also see ridiculous changes, like how I didn’t initially plan for Zuko to join the Gaang, but then Sokka went all uncdad on me and I was like “all right, re-writing this entire ending now.” And Zhao was actually supposed to survive, but he did way too good of a job villain-ing. 

When starting stories, this is how my outlines typically look. Breaking things up into chapters and detailing events comes more on a chapter-by-chapter basis as I get closer to writing them. And things change lots. 

Changes are normal and good, you just need to remember to trace them through the rest of your outline before committing to them to make sure you aren’t totally derailing your story.