I&E follow-along: Outlining

This week I’ve been off work, so despite the distractions of a convention I’ve managed to get most of HtTS Lesson 8′s exercises done. I still have a few gaps in my character planning, but I have the core of their story motivation so that will do for now. The rest required little or no work, since I’d already done the wordbuilding during my earlier brainstorming phase.

So, next up is the outline! I’ve decided I want to try outlining this book in detail, just to find out if I can make the method work for me—I have plenty of time this summer for experimenting. The idea is that if I can do it this way, I can storm through the first draft this autumn in a couple of months and end up with something that doesn’t need to be rewritten from scratch before I dare show it to my agent!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I don’t jump straight to scene cards these days. Instead I take a leaf out of Rachel Aaron‘s book and write my initial outline as a single continuous document. Basically it’s a synopsis, but written before the draft instead of after—and later in the process I can use it as a foundation for the actual synopsis I send to my agent. Right now it stands at a little over 1300 words, but I dare say it’ll be a lot longer than that before I’m done!

I put it together as follows:

First I wrote a paragraph that briefly describes the setting: the island and empire of the series’ working title. After that I started writing out as much of the story as I already knew, in chronological order and including any necessary explanation alongside the events, regardless of when that information is revealed to the reader. The plot outline is for my information only and not intended to resemble the structure of the finished draft.

At this stage, of course, the outline is very top-heavy: most of it consists of what will probably be Act One and is almost chapter-by-chapter in detail, whereas the rest is far less complete (the climax and denouement are just a couple of sentences!). That’s OK, though. Act One is the foundation of the rest of the book, after all, so I need that to be solid before I move on to the rest.

Note that I’m not avoiding scene cards altogether. I’ve started writing a detailed outline for a potential opening scene, purely because it’s begun to unfold in my head—I’m not going to turn down a gift from my Muse when it’s offered! However this may not end up being the opening, or even appear in the finished draft at all, which is why I’m only outlining at the moment.

My plan is to get the outline finished by the end of September at the latest, and certainly I don’t expect to have it done before the end of August. In a way I see this outlining process as being a replacement for my usual “draft zero”—a rough run-through of the plot that lets me identify glaring inconsistencies and leaps of logic. It’s worth a try, anyway!