The First Outline

 Hello future writers,

This post is about making an outline for your story, be it an original or a fanfiction. 

First, you have to have an idea about what you want to write about. For example, I knew that I wanted to write a detective story.

Second, you have to sit down and think about how many characters are going to be in the story. Don’t worry about the minor characters for now. We will talk about characters later.

Third, now that you have a basic idea about what your story is about and how many major characters you have, it is time to start the outline.

I searched for a good outline on the internet and hunted the books about it, when I noticed the Scene by Scene process. Then, I looked what a scene is and I found it in the Outlining your Novel by K. M. Weiland. Of course, I had to adjust this process to my type of thinking and so I opened my bullet journal to a new page wrote my title Scenes and started numbering them and describing what happened, not bothering with grammar and little details. After a while I noticed that I had a lot of scenes and so I went through them and noticed that all this time, I didn’t write a scene but a detailed summary of what is going to happen. Here is an example of my outline. I put down the chapter and beside it is a date that indicates about when the plot is going to happen.

But what about the characters? How did you know what character did what in the Summary outline? Since I didn’t give them names and the descriptions yet, I named them by their position in the book, such as: the main detective, the boss of the team, the victim, the husband of the victim, suspect 1 and so on.

This process helped me since I didn’t want to start planning the names of the characters their description and I didn’t even know where the story will be played.

And so, I advise you to try this outlining method. If you are stuck in the middle of outlining or even if you are just starting. It will free you from worrying about how the character looks and what his name is. This outline method is the best for the main plot and just general sub-plots (which we will talk about later). The development of the character and more detailed sub-plots will be added to the outline at a later date.

Since I wanted to write a detective story, I had to have an additizýonal step in this process and that is the case and details about it. How they are going to find the evidence and who killed the victim. I made my notes about this at first but realised that a lot changed when I made the outline. And that is okay. Thinks will change all the time. In the end, it is fun to look over the first and last outline.

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With love, Misha.