Outlining in Excel

 Hello future writers.

As I said in the last post, I created an excel document to help me with the outline and basically what needs to be written where.

I wrote scenes but sometimes without the conversations or description and the facts that I need for my detective story, that I need to add to them. And when I started looking over the scenes it was really chaotic and so I was inspired to create the document by Adele Marie.

I numbered the scenes and so that it would be more organized I divided the scenes into chapters. Then I wrote which characters will be in the scene, where it is (in Los Angeles county) and the summary of the "scene".

In these columns I tried to fill them up, but as I read, not all of the scenes have to be action packed and have conflict. Sometimes it's good to use normal non-action scene like for example a summary of the case from the detective's point of view.

The goal of the scene can be divided into two:

1. the goal of the characters in the story - finding evidence
2. the goal of the scene that I want to portray - for example the first scene.

These two columns I used to help me with the developments, mainly the character one is important because then I can have notes where one of my characters develops or the reader finds out knew information, be it implicit or explicit. 

The plot development is just to keep track of the story, that way if I read only the plot development I can have the murder, introduction, collecting evidence, interrogation,..... and then solving the murder case.

These columns are really important, because they help me when I need to know what I skipped in the scene. The first three are self-explanatory, but the fourth column is when a character thinks something (Only Niko because of the 3rd p. o. v.) or the other characters are using monologue.

The first column is a word count of the scene while the third one is what I wrote. I still need to exchange the 2nd and 3rd column. But the "Total" column has formula that counts the first and third column together.

And that is basically it for the excel document. Of course if you have any questions or suggestions please leave a comment. If you have a different method to keep track of these things, please don't hesitate to share them in the comment section.

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With love, Misha.