Outlines Are My Friend

The most transformative piece of writing advice I’ve read this year: don’t start writing prose until you’ve outlined every scene for your novel.

In Scrivener, I made a flash card for every scene, giving each one a brief synopsis. I fleshed out the entire novel in accordance with the story structure outlined by Larry Brooks in his book Story Engineering. My goal was about 80 scenes total, evenly divided into four quarters.

The first time I did this, it took me over a month to finish the outline. KM Weiland, in her book Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success, says she takes months to complete an outline.

It may sound crazy to do that much work on just the outline, but I’ve not once had writer’s block once I actually sat down to write this novel. The writing process is straightforward and predictable. A quarter of the way through, I can see that I’m well on track to meet my total word-count goal for the book. Before I outlined to this extent, my novels were falling short of the total length I was shooting for.

Maybe other writers won’t like this method but I’m officially a fan.