I’ve wanted to do a post for a while about my outlining method, but I keep running into a problem. Outlining is a squishy process for me, and it changes basically every time I write a book. Every set of ideas I’ve ever come up with needs something different in the planning process in order to make sense and become the story I have in my head. I also love trying out different methods whenever I learn about a new one. For me, that’s a huge part of the fun. It would be basically impossible to definitively say “this is my method for outlining,” and judging by the number of outlining-related posts I see that start with phrases like “currently” or “these days” or “at the moment,” I’m guessing a lot of other writers feel the same way.

So instead, here are five things I always try to do when I outline, regardless of the method or format I’m using, to help support strong story structure, compelling character arcs, general cohesion, and increased levels of sanity once I actually start the draft.

Start at the end

There are two things I want you to write down, right at the top of your outline, before you begin: the ending of the story, and a brutally short summary of every major plot twist, reveal, or hidden secret in the story. This is first on the list because when I started doing this, my outlines became about 5000% more useful to me overnight, and I can’t believe I wasn’t doing this before. Here’s why.

First of all, if you are like me and tend to lose the forest for the trees, you are highly likely to lose track of at least one of these things at some point. You’ll forget to foreshadow something, lose track of an important subplot, or inadvertently change tack midway through your draft on a stroke of inspiration. I’ve written an embarrassing number of stories where I forgot where I was going with the ending, and accidentally set up entirely the wrong conclusion for the book, then had the nerve to wonder why it wasn’t coming together like I’d imagined. The number I’ve times in my early novel-writing attempts when I had to re-brainstorm the same ending of a book multiple times thanks to my tunnel vision and shoddy memory is beyond counting. What I have come to realize is that it’s also very, very normal. Stories are huge places, and even when you’re the one building it, it’s perilously easy to get lost.

Keeping the details of your ending and major plot twists listed out plainly in a place you’re likely to refer to many times (and in a format that allows you to scan them quickly, without having to dig or concentrate) will help you stay on track, and help you better evaluate when something you came up with along the way really is better than what you started with.

Secondly, reveals and plot twists are big moments. Moments where everything changes for the characters in an instant. We’re not just talking about information – we’re talking about the emotional linchpins of your story. You not only want to be very clear about what those things are when you’re outlining, but keep them at the forefront of your mind as you proceed. Pinning them to the top of the page where you plan your story is a good way to do that. If your outline is a map, your list of plot twists is the compass that goes with it. Without one, the other is – well, not useless, but certainly far less effective.

Allow yourself more than one medium

Outlining isn’t just the act of planning out a novel. It’s really about brainstorming. This is the part of the process where you want to generate as many new ideas as possible, and ideas don’t always grow where they’re first planted. Sometimes you need different soil.

If you get stuck while outlining, switch mediums. If you were typing, grab a notebook. If you were writing it out in bullet points, try drawing a mind map or a flow chart instead. Try color coding, or erase your color coding if you already had it. You might find that the format you gravitate towards when you’re outlining is totally different than the format you use when you’re actually writing the book. It also might change from story to story, or as you develop as a writer. The point is to treat this process not as one of rigid preparation, but flexible, imaginative brainstorming.

This might be controversial, but I’d also give yourself permission to use more than one medium at the same time if you need to. Juggling more than one outline can be a recipe for disaster, it’s true, but in some cases the risk is worth it for the additional vantage point it gives you. I have a project where I track all my character arcs in a flow-chart-like format in Scapple (a mind-mapping app), but the actual plot outline is a list of bullet points in a separate document, and there’s also an overall series outline that takes the form of an Excel spreadsheet. Does this get confusing? Hell yeah, sometimes! But turning the mess in my brain into a cohesive story on a page requires a halfway point that is chaotic enough to capture everything swirling around in my head, but systematic enough that it allows material to then be translated into an actual book. If three separate outlines in three different formats are what I need in order to make that happen, then I guess it’s happening. In my defense, at least I’m using the same color-coding scheme across the board.

Outline character arcs separately

Speaking of outlining your character arcs separately, your outline shouldn’t just be plot-based! It needs to include information about your character arcs as well. And sometimes these are easiest to see and work with if you parse them out completely.

You do not have to use the vortex-of-chaos method from my last example, though. There are ways to do this that will not give the more organized among you a migraine. Sometimes if I’m outlining in a spreadsheet or flow chart format, I’ll include a separate column for each of the major characters where I write about what’s going on with their arc at each point in the plot. If I’m using bullet points, sometimes I’ll add sub-bullets to do this, or use comments in the margins. The point is that in any format, I find a way to encode information about character arcs in a way that allows me to separate out that arc, hold it up to the light, and really ask myself if it makes sense.

You can sometimes identify some pretty big holes in your story by doing this, which might not have come to light so easily if you hadn’t extracted the character arc and written it out as its own entity. It’s also a good way to visualize how the arcs of all your characters interact, making it easy to set up things like character foils and manage convoluted interpersonal drama (especially if you’re juggling a large cast of characters).

Add detail around act breaks

No matter what kind of story structure you’re using, get clear on where your act breaks are and what is going to change in the immediate aftermath of each of them. If you prefer to work from a minimal plan, this is the spot where I recommend you focus most of your outlining energy. Basically, if you plan nothing else, at least plan your act breaks.

Stories are more digestible when they are broken up in to chunks: parts, chapters, scenes, etc. Acts are just another type of chunk, specifically a huge one within which the emotional tone, the state of the world, and other large-scale elements of the story are consistent. My favorite way to think of act breaks is as the large-scale emotional delineations in the story. This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be up and downs within acts – of course there should! But huge, character-arc-bending changes in motivation, worldview, ideals, goals, and conflicts tend to happen primarily at the act breaks.

When you reach an act break in your outlining process, be very clear about what has changed. Write out explicitly how your characters’ worldviews have shifted and why, and what that means for their motivation going forward. This will help you re-orient your own view of the story and the emotional state of your characters when you get to each of these points, and your story structure will be stronger for it.

Revise your outline just like your book

For every version of a story (first draft, second draft, etc.), I usually end up with 2-3 different versions of my outline. For an early-stage draft, this can be a full, top-to-bottom overhaul of the major plot points and character arcs. Later on, as the draft develops, the changes are likely to be smaller and more to do with fleshing things out than actually altering the course of the story. No matter how small, these changes to the outline are a critical piece of how I get my head around what I’m writing, and keep the end goal in mind.

Never treat your outline as a finished thing – not until you’re ready to treat the book itself as a finished thing too. Set aside time at each stage of the process to return to it with a critical eye and make sure it still reflects the story you’re trying to write. This is a great thing to do when you feel stuck, too. A bird’s eye view of your story can be a magical cure for writer’s block, and that’s basically all an outline is. It’s the whole book, all in one place, in a format that makes the main points clear and easy to parse. Reading an outline is like reading through your whole book through a highly technical lens in 5 minutes. You can probably see how this would be a truly magical source of inspiration and troubleshooting… if your outline truly reflected what was in the book, or how you want the book to go.

Treat your outline as a living document. It should grow and change just as the story does, and you should always feel free to alter it, or make a new version to try out what would happen if you took the story in a completely different direction. Outlines don’t have to be rigidly formulaic instructions you lay out from the beginning and treat as immutable – they can be a pantser’s tool as well as a planner’s. Write them, rewrite them, rip them to bits, make twelve more all with a different outcome, go nuts! This is supposed to be a fun creative journey, not a technical challenge on the Great British Bake-Off.

Now get out there and do some scheming.

Happy outlining!