Outlining! DO IT!

The hard truth is, there's only a few small people in the world that can write a full length novel without an Outline, so if you've ever caught yourself thinking, or do think for that matter that you can write without one, chances are, you can't.

I'm sorry, but its the god honest truth and I'm not saying it to demean you. Its good that you're that confident and I hope you're one of those small few that can operate without one, but as I said, the chances are slim that you can, and here's why!

Think for a moment how monumental the task of writing a novel is. Its huge, no one way or another about it. Even if you're writing short stories or novellas its still a huge under taking in its own write because its not enough that you have an idea in your head, trust me on this. I have hundreds of stories in my head and only about forty of them have been gotten to a point where I've started recording them down in notebooks to develop later.

And thats what you have to do with an idea. You have to develop it into a story, and that means World Building, Creating Characters, you have to have an idea of what your Start, Middle and End is and then you have to work out how that how sequence comes together, and believe me its not as simple as characters going from Point A to Point B. If it was, everyone and their dog would be a writer and stories would suck major ass.

A story is long twisted mess of events, detours and situations that you have to keep track of. And you're not just keeping track of your story, ooooooh no. You also have to keep track of your characters, you have to know how they're growing, and you have to keep them in check when they start trying to tell the story they want to tell.

You have to know when and where things are going to or have happened, how its going to affect the story and how its going to affect your characters and the world you've created.

This is why an Outline is your friend.

Now there's tons of ways to outline and plan your story and I'm not going to tell you what they all are, thats why the Cyber Gods gave us Google.

I will tell you how I outline though.

I tend to think of an Outline as a dirty, messy dry run of the story.

When I'm outlining, I write a play by play for each chapter. A lot of people they just write a single sentence play by play of the most important things that happen in their chapters, I however, write paragraphs of semi detailed play by plays, in which I detail whats happening in the story, how the characters are developinging, how they're interacting - dialogue and such - and what they're feeling about the situation. And this could mean that I end up with four or five pages of bullet pointed paragraphs.

Thats what works for me though. As I said there are dozens of different ways to do it and different things work for different people, you just have to find which one works for you and go from there.

I just know that with my method, once I have outline done or at the very least the chapter I want to write, I can knock that chapter over inside of an hour or two depending on my focus.

By the end of the first week of NaNo this year, I was already three to four days in front thanks to having my outline mostly done.