Outlining 101

When I first started writing (2018?) I just sat down and began typing. Stream-of-consciousness kind of thing. DO NOT DO THIS. If you're going to be a writer you need structure to build on, and that means you need an outline.

An idea would pop into my head and I would write it down as a single sentence or paragraph, name it "Novel_Idea_8" and save it in a new sub-folder under a folder named "Unpublished." Soon I had ten of these. Some became (still unpublished) short stories. Most went nowhere. Most are still only a single paragraph.

As I found inspiration, reading something somewhere, seeing something in everyday life, I'd pull up a"Novel" file and add it, a sentence at a time. For instance, in 2021 we took a 10 day cruise from Malta to Croatia. Loved it! Took photos, ate wonderful foods. I added things to the outline - still less than a page, still a bland story. It needed conflict. A focus. Then I read somewhere that Josip Broz Tito forbade his female partisans from becoming pregnant or he would have the MAN executed. I read about the "Bura wind." A book in my library I'd owned for 20 years ("TRAMP" by Michael J. Krieger), revealed a heavy lift vessel in Croatia named "Buga". I'd known about Operation Torch for years. I read up about the Independent State of Croatia. It all coalesced. Still only one page but it had most of the elements.

You know you're ready to take off when you wake hours before the alarm goes off, thinking about your story. You can't get to sleep at night for thinking of details to add, so you open the calendar on your phone and type a keyword or two to jog your memory the next day.

Now I could start in earnest creating my outline. You do one scene at a time, adding snatches of dialogue, thinking about 'blocking'. Planning scene breaks. Day by day you outline a scene, never in order, jumping back and forth as you find inspiration. Some days you don't write at all because that day is devoted to research, at the library or on the web. One third, or maybe half, at the end below the line, is just stuff, details you found on the web, cut and pasted in at the bottom (never the whole page, just an important paragraph) to save it and identified as "Note 7", etc. Here you also save the URL's where you found it so you can find it again. Wikipedia is your friend, but MAKE SURE you chase down the source documentation: you DO NOT want to be paraphrasing somebody's uninformed opinion! Also, I am simply amazed at how much information I can glean by searching YouTube for old films of "Batavia 1941" or of "Kyoto 1947" and sit taking notes as I watch.

The portion you typed above what you've pasted in, is your completed outline. Within some sentence you'll have "July 2nd Groves and Stimson argue (see note 7 below)." You do it this way to keep your creative juices flowing uninterrupted, to keep another author's voice from muddling your own.

From that one page the outline document grew to 20,000 words. With the outline finished, you start a new document and if you have a title you name it that. This is your actual novel. Novels are generally running 80,000 to 100,000 words finished. You keep both documents open. As inspiration hits you, you cut and paste a sentence or paragraph from the outline into the novel to work on it there. The part you took from the outline you highlight (in the outline) to remind you it's been transferred. I like to use "Green2" but sometimes the default yellow.

Two more important documents are your timeline and your character spreadsheet. The latter is a simple spreadsheet with character names across the top and years down the left. Each column has the person's birth age ("0") through to when they die or they disappear from the story. I highlight their milestones such as marriage (or children, these get their own column).

For the timeline I go old-school: I google "1941 calendar" and print out in landscape format each month the story covers. On this I draw a line from story beginning to end. As the story develops I draw a heavy dot on the line crossing a date, a keyword such as "Leave Singapore" and the time. Why a line? So that if a character leaves, going off on an adventure, they get a separate line until they return. Another aspect is if there's a hard date that must be met (i.e., Kyoto's Cherry Blossom festival 17 April 1947) you can work backwards from there to establish a beginning. You use GoogleEarth to chart your voyages, or "walk around" in some place to get the details.

Every week you copy the folder where all this resides over to a good quality thumb drive (I've had a bad quality drive go bad on me). You want to save it all in three places; the computer, the thumb drive, and finally "Reedsy", so that if anything gets stolen you can still recover.

It is in this way that Novel_Idea_5 became 1941's "Heavy Cargo." Novel_Idea_8 became 1942's "The Belfair Pinch." Novel_Idea_9 will become 1947's "The Bitter Pit of the Cherry." I have an idea germinating for a novel set in 1943 or 1944 Denmark. It's now only a single sentence! I will do nothing with it until The Bitter Pit of the Cherry is complete.

Ryan