#outlining.

From this meme.

Please don’t be afraid of outlines! I was one of the people who hated outlines, and then I buckled the fuck down because I was struggling with my work and told myself that it certainly can’t hurt for me to try. 

So I found a few outline techniques and read them all and eventually came up with an outline technique that worked really well! You can find my post about it RIGHT HERE. I don’t expect it to work for everyone, and I have reblogged several different techniques to break down and outline a novel on my blog!

But I am here to plead with you PLEASE DON’T BE AFRAID OF OUTLINES! There are no rules, only guidelines and recommendations. Everything is personal to the writer, and flexible. The techniques are there to get a foundation put in place, to create a skeleton for you to visualize your story! 

I cannot emphasize this enough; there is no one way to outline. 

I broke my novel down very numerically, I gave myself numerical goals to hit. 90k, 25 chapters, 3.5k per chapter, 4 scenes, 875 words per scene. And I gave myself 4 bullet points and some “sticky note” allowances to write down only the MOST NECESSARY of events that had to happen in that scene to move the story forward. The sticky note were for special details, and were rather few in number. 

GUESS WHAT? When it came to actually writing, I was surprising myself with how the events I had put in my outline were playing out. My characters were expressing themselves in ways I hadn’t anticipated all while still following the extremely loose outline I had made. 

Some scenes ended up moved to different chapters, some chapters have fewer scenes, and the scenes have spoken for themselves, their length has varied from 500 to 2k, chapters have reached 6k. It all depends on what the chapter needs, and the meat of the emotion. 

You aren’t locking yourself in to an unbreakable contract when you are outlining. You are allowed to deviate from it if you think you have had a eureka moment about the nature of the plot/narrative, or even if you aren’t feeling the current direction. You can change it for any reason. Just keep the original outline handy and build a new version from the deviation so you can maintain that visual representation. Who knows, maybe someday those documents will be worth a lot of money by your biggest fans, “getting to see X author’s process of creating X book”.

Outlining is merely meant to break down your novel from a MONSTROUS IDEA into a bite sized reality. 

I had a eureka moment for part of my plot, and plopped that tidbit into the outline happily. I have had to start speaking in chapters instead of word count because my chapters wanted to be longer than I anticipated. I don’t have XX thousand words left to write, I have XX chapters left to write. 

I know a lot of people worry that they’ll get too invested in an outline, that they will lose the joy of writing when trapped within an outline. My outline took about 5 days to finish. There are a myriad of ways to outline, nothing too simple and nothing too detailed, no technique unhelpful, you just have to find what works for out. It’s just there to take the mess in your head and make it a little more clear cut, give you a path. 

Your outline isn’t your enemy, it’s your ally, and it can be anything you need it to be. 

Your garden will grow chaotically if you do not at least have a strategy for where you want to plant the seeds.