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I Finally Learned How to Write an Outline
My brain had to develop a whole new wrinkle for this
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.
