Cy asked David Wong:

Are there any particular narrative structures that you use when outlining? Such as three-act structure, freytag’s pyramid, kishotenketsu, and so on. How do you make sure a story outline “works” in a dramatic sense? Or do you start with a general sense of what's going to happen, and leave certain dramatic decisions for the writing itself?

David Wong I have almost no formal training in fiction writing so if it seems like my books fall into something like a three-act structure that's mainly because movies are just what I know. If you grabbed a random person off the street, I think they'd use that same structure, too, even without knowing what it's called - that's just the natural rhythm of stories as we're usually taught them.

As for how I make sure an outline works, with any writer ultimately they're just reading it and trying to step outside themselves to say, "If I was a stranger reading this, would I be bored right now?" And just with any other craft you have tools available to fix it. You can add some element of danger to a scene, you can raise the stakes, you can shorten it, etc. I don't want to make the process sound cold and mechanical, you still have these larger themes and emotions at play, but to get the reader to where you want them to go you have to be able to ask yourself frank questions like, "Are they going to care enough about this character to read this part? Is this scene answering a question they were really asking? Is the reader going to be reading this subplot and wishing they could get back to the main story?"

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