Now that my Thanksgiving turkey is reduced to a single plate of leftovers and most of the chocolate pie is gone, I’m spending the rest of this holiday weekend working on the outline for my historical novel (working title: Historical Novel).

Outlines for me are a serious business. I can’t write without one. And it has to be extremely detailed. Writing the outline is how I decide what’s going to happen, but it’s also how I keep track of my pacing, intertwine the subplots with the main plot, and ensure that my characters are growing at an appropriate pace and that said growth is demonstrated by their actions. It’s also how I keep myself motivated to write ― because every time I sit down with my computer, instead of despairing over the monumental task that is WRITING A BOOK OMG, I just look at my outline and it tells me what I’m supposed to write today.

So here’s how I do it.

  1. When I decide to pursue a story idea, I start out by creating a “Notes” file. This is a Word doc where I brainstorm about the story. It winds up being a set of loosely connected ideas about the characters and the plots, only some of which will make it into the final story. But format-wise, it’s a stream-of-consciousness list of thoughts that only I could possibly follow. For my last book, the one that’s out on submission now, my Notes file has 12,000 words. For Historical Novel, it currently has 25,000. (And then there’s also the separate “Research” file for HN, which has another 50,000 words of notes from source materials, because hey, it’s historical.)
  2. Once I feel like my Notes file has enough material to start constructing an outline, I go through it carefully, sorting the ideas into categories (for character traits, key relationships, significant plot points, etc.) This is when I sort out what I want to include in the final story and what to leave out. They’re tough decisions; I like all my ideas and want to use every single one, but I tried that with my first book and the result was 100,000 words of miscellaneous stuff happening before I’d even gotten to the third act. I learned that editing is just as important at the planning stages of the book as it is in revising the first draft. Probably more so.
  3. Now, for the tedious, but crucial, part: I open an Excel doc. Actually, by this point in the process I usually already have one started; Excel is where I keep my list of characters (including every character ever mentioned by name and their key details ― name, age, year in school, sexual orientation, relationship to the protagonists, etc.) and the main characters’ class schedules. But that Excel doc has several other sheets, and the sheet I’m working on now is the most important ― the Outline sheet. I go into that blank sheet and set up columns labeled “X,” “Act,” “Chapter,” “POV,” “Date,” and “Events.” Then I fill in the rows below. Each row does not correspond to one scene; usually, each scene will get between two and ten rows, depending on its complexity.
    • X is for marking a row as completed. When I finish writing that row, it gets an X in that column, and I do a little cheer.
    • Act is helpful for reminding me where I am in the story on a broad level. My stories usually have three or four acts of roughly equal length, separated by major turning points. Seeing the act number of a scene on the outline helps me keep track of where I should be in the pacing (e.g. if nothing new has happened to this character since act 2, I need to switch things up in act 3 before I have her suddenly turning around and being all important in act 4).
    • Chapter & POV are especially important for me because I usually write from two main characters’ POVs and alternate the chapters between them. So if I’m going to have Character A do something important near the first act turning point, I need to know in advance that she’s going to do it in Chapter 6, because she won’t have another chance until Chapter 8.
    • For Date, I use an actual calendar (I have a 2010 year-at-a-glance that I’ve been using for a while now) so that I can easily figure out when the days of the week fall, how long it will have been before a homework assignment given in Chapter 4 should be due, how likely it is that two characters will fall in love over a one-week period, etc. I hate it when I’m reading a book (or watching a TV show) and it’s obvious that the writers weren’t looking at a calendar when they constructed the plot. American high school students don’t go to school for eight days in a row. And women don’t take pregnancy tests in May and then give birth a year later. Babies don’t care when sweeps week is.
    • But the Events column is the one that really matters. I’ll use as many rows as needed to describe the events of a scene, in as much detail as I know it. I describe who’s present, what the characters do, how the characters react to what’s happening, even tiny details like what people are wearing or what throwaway lines they say while the real action is building up ― anything that I know at this point, I’ll put in.

While I’m putting all this together, I don’t necessarily fill in all the rows in order. I usually start with the main turning points, then fill in the rest of the pieces. This is when I figure out the order in which everything happens ― how twist A leads to minor subplot point B, etc. It takes a long time, but it’s fun. Because this is when my story, which started out as a series of loosely connected thoughts, really starts to fall into place as a whole. This is when I effectively “read” the book for the first time. And in the end, I have a pretty substantial document. My original outline for my last book wound up being 11,000 words in 135 Excel rows.

But even once I’ve filled in this first go at my outline, using the material from my Notes file, I still wind up with a lot that I want to add in. So I do that after I start writing, because that’s when I usually get ideas for things that need to happen later in the book.

For example, my last book had one chapter that takes place at a bar where my protagonist is hanging out with a group of friends. I planned to include this scene from the very beginning; it was there to advance one of the major subplots and to build up to the main-plot turning point that would begin Act 2. I knew from the beginning that it would include several key expository dialogue exchanges and open my protagonist’s eyes to some important new ideas. But I didn’t know what all those moments would be when I first outlined this scene, so when I started out, the chapter had about 5 rows in my spreadsheet devoted to it. As I worked more on the outline, and as I wrote the chapters that preceded this one, I figured out more of what needed to be said and realized in the bar scene. The final version of my outline had 17 rows for that chapter, each corresponding to a key bit of information transmitted via dialogue or a key realization that my character had internally. In the end, those 17 rows of outline notes translated to about 5,000 words of text in the finished manuscript.

And sometimes I do make more significant changes to my outline on the fly. My last book was originally supposed to take place over the course of an academic year, from August through May. Once I was five or six chapters into it, I realized that my characters were growing too fast and the story’s pacing would work better if the timeline were more compressed, so I reduced the timeline to one semester, ending in December. I cut a couple of planned scenes, moved a turning point scene from Christmas break to Thanksgiving, and removed a minor spring break subplot ― all in the outline. I hadn’t started writing any of the relevant chapters yet, but if my outline didn’t reflect the story as I currently saw it, I’d be lost when I sat down to begin. Perfecting the outline is almost as important to my process as perfecting the text itself.

As I mentioned, I do all this in Word and Excel. I don’t use Scrivener because until very recently, it was only available for Macs. But I plan to download it as soon as the PC version is out of beta. From what I understand, it makes a lot of what I’ve described above easier (not having to navigate back and forth between two different programs, for example, would rock). But I don’t think my basic process will change that much, just that there will be fewer clicks involved.

So that’s me and my extremely anal process. I have yet to meet another writer who does it this way, but I’d love to! Anyone out there?