Deconstructing my Outline

In my last blog post, I spoke about what I've called the Domino Vs Jigsaw effect: how I was writing random exciting scenes for my book and ended up with big gaps in the story that I wasn't sure how to fill, a bit like a jigsaw. I realised that I needed to revisit my outline and add more depth to it so that I could try and write one scene consecutively after the other to help the flow of the story, a bit like dominoes so that one scene would fall on top of the other until I reached the end. 

Up until that point, I've got to admit my outline looked a bit like a jigsaw itself. I knew how it was going to start and I knew how I wanted it to end. But the middle was just a big, gaping, uninspiring hole that I was struggling to fill. I've heard that this is quite common and the middle is always the hardest but no one ever seems to explain how they go around fixing that. 

Then the other day I was watching a webinar through the Jericho Summer Festival of Writing with Thomas Emson (by the way if you've not heard of Jericho Writer's you should definitely check them out!) Thomas explained, among other things, how he split his outline for one of his novels up into sections and I thought I would give this a go as well. I need to state that my idea that I am going to share comes from advice given by Thomas Emson and all credit should go to him for my lovely new outline. 

Deconstructing my Outline 

So, the first thing I thought about was that I have four main characters in my story each with their own story ARCs and I knew that I wanted to tell the story in the third person but switching points of view throughout the story. I decided to write four shorter outlines, one for each character outlining the story from their points of view. Here's a quick video of what my outline looked like when separated into the four separate characters:

This forced me to think more carefully about each character and the part that they play in the story. I thought more about their personalities, their goals and what motivates them.

If you don't have multiple main characters, maybe your story switches between different timelines or locations? Whatever it may be, try writing the outline of the story from each perspective first. 

I wrote each four outlines on the same word document and numbered each scene. So for example:

Character one:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Character two:

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Character Three

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

...And so on. Obviously, there were a lot more than 5 scenes per character but you get the idea 😁. 

Putting it back together again

Once I had finished my separate outlines, now it was time to merge them to form my one main story outline. So I opened up a new word document and using number bullet points again, began to copy and paste the points from the four-character outlines in their chronological order. In the end, my outline looked like this:

This method may not work for everyone, however, I found it really helpful as I had known I had to flesh out my outline but until now struggled with this. It also encouraged me to go back to my character outlines and backstories and learn more about them which has helped me develop my story further. 

If you're also trying to write your story outline and want to give this method a go, I would recommend checking out Thomas Emson's "How to write a novel in 6 months" guide which will explain this idea and lots more great advice. If you want to find out more about Thomas Emson, please check out his Twitter and Website:

Twitter: @Thomasemson

http://thomasemson.com/

I'd love to know if you have tried this method and what your thoughts are on if it worked for you. Do you have a different method that worked instead? Feel free to let me know in the comments below!👇