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I Finally Learned How to Write an Outline

Robin James
4 min readFeb 8, 2023

My brain had to develop a whole new wrinkle for this

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

I’ve finished my first novel and sent it off to publishers and agents in hopes that someone other than me will market it. While I wait to hear back, I’ve started on the sequel.

This time I thought it would be easier if I had an outline to follow. With the first novel, I just wrote out a whole bunch of cool stuff, then figured out what should stay and what should go.

This wasn’t the most efficient way of assembling a novel.

No word is wasted, all writing is practice writing, but I did feel like I could have avoided cutting swaths of text if I’d known what direction the book was going, where to foreshadow, and what elements needed to show up a bit earlier.

Hence the idea of an outline.

As a discovery writer (or pantser) I often have no idea where my stories are going until I’ve typed for a while. My husband described my process as, “An outline is like building a skeleton and putting meat and stuff on it. When you write, you follow the character around and type out everything you see, then go back and use an x-ray to find the problems.” He’s pretty much right. It’s like the action of typing releases all the story bits that were hiding in my mind.

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Robin James
Robin James

Written by Robin James

When I’m not writing my novel I’m writing rants and whatnot. Figured I might as well post them here.

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