outline

All posts tagged outline

Step One: How to Outline Your Novel

Posted by Dawn Ross on July 14, 2020
Posted in: Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Plot Storyboard

There are several ways to outline a novel. Some writers already have the story in their head and don’t need to do a formal outline. Others like to create a formal plan. For those of you who map out your story before tackling the writing part, here are some ways you can do it.

It helps to start with a plot structure. There are several different plot structures to choose from.

The 3-Act Structure

Freytag’s Pyramid

The Heroe’s Journey

The Fichtean Curve

In Medias Res

7-Point Story Structure

The Plot Dot

Do your research to determine which structure is best for your story. I prefer the Plot Dot method. You can google it or read my blog post about it here – The Plot Dot

Using a plot structure doesn’t mean you can’t add subplots or deviate a little from the hard outline. Doing a basic outline using a plot structure helps you get the essential parts of your novel in order.

If you’re like me and want more detail, start with the plot structure then add chapters to each plot point. The number of chapters for each plot point can vary. You generally want to reach the inciting incident quickly, but the number of chapters leading to the final battle can be many.

I sometimes use notecards to outline my novel. I use white notecards for the main story and colored notecards for the subplots. Notecards help make it easier to switch, add, or delete scenes (but then again, so do the cut and paste options on digital documents).

A storyboard can help you visualize your novel. You can also find storyboard worksheets online. These worksheets can help you establish the setting and characters for each scene, as well as the events that take place.

There are also some great online writing tools and apps that can help you outline your novel. I’ve heard a lot about Scrivener. I’ve also heard about Trello and XMind. Googling “tools to help you outline your novel” can help you find more. Some are free and some you have to pay for.

Don’t get too caught up in creating an outline. Your outline is a guide to help you stay on your main path. An outline that’s too detailed might limit your creativity. Create an outline for your novel but stay flexible.

Are you a pantser or a planner? Do you know of any other plot structures to use for wring a novel? How do you outline your novel? I’d love to hear from you.

Steps to Writing and Self-Publishing a Novel

Posted by Dawn Ross on July 7, 2020
Posted in: Marketing, Publishing, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

How many steps are there from writing a novel to self-publishing it? I’m sure the answer varies depending on your skill, writing process, and resources. For me, there are fifteen steps from the initial planning of the novel to publishing and marketing it. Some are easy, some are hard, and some cost money.

Step One: Outline the Novel

You can either outline your novel or wing it. Some people (called panters) enjoy the freedom of winging it. It can lead to some interesting surprises. I prefer outlining my novel. I generally already have a good idea of what I want to happen in my story and outlining helps me keep the story on track. You can make your outline as generic or as detailed as you want.

Step Two: Write the Novel

You can either try to perfect your novel in the first draft or write a rough draft and reach the goal of writing an entire novel. I write my entire novel during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is in November. Since my story is written quickly, it is an extremely rough draft that probably shouldn’t be submitted to anyone for reading.

Step Three: Review/Rewrite the Novel

Whether you tried to perfect your novel in the first draft or wrote an extremely rough draft, you will want to give your novel a read-through and fix any issues you find before you submit it to people for reading.

Step Four: Get Feedback on the Novel

Find beta-readers or other writers who are willing to give you feedback on your novel. This is not always easy. You could end up with people who tend to always give good feedback for fear of hurting your feelings. You could get someone more focused on grammar or punctuation errors (which is okay but not needed yet). Or you could end up with people who give feedback that does not really apply to your style or preferences. If you’re lucky, though, you can get some insightful information that will help make your story better. I am currently in this step for The Dragon Emperor: Book Two of the Dragon Spawn Chronicles.

Step Five: Rewrite Again

The feedback you get in the previous step could point out issues you never thought of. Some of those issues could be small while others could be huge. Either way, it is likely you will need to do some rewriting.

Step Six: Hire a Development/Content Editor

I know this step can be pricy, but I would not recommend skipping it. You don’t know what you don’t know. A development editor can help you learn. Would you rather have a professional point out some serious story problems, or have readers so put off by your errors that they leave you negative reviews? You owe it to yourself and to your readers to have your work looked at by a professional. A development/content editor can help you find plot holes, make sure your writing style is consistent, point out places where the writing could be improved or clarified, and more. Take the time to find a development editor who knows your genre and whose editing methods you admire.

Step Seven: Rewrite Again

The newer you are at writing, the more a development editor is likely to find. But even experienced writers will have things they need to fix. We writers tend to be so close to our story that we forget to put some of the things in our head into the story.

Step Eight: Hire a Copy Editor

A copy editor will look for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Don’t hire this type of editor until you’re sure your story is as close to perfect as you can make it.

Step Nine: Polish the Novel

Fix the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors of your story.

Step Ten: Market

There are several ways to market your book. There are too many to be covered in this post, so look for a follow-up post later. If you’re new to writing, you may want to start your marketing by building a social media following before you write. Twitter, for example, is a great place to find both aspiring and successful writers who are happy to support a new writer.

Step Eleven: Get a Book Cover

You can design your own or hire someone to do your book cover. If you design your own, make sure you do not take images from the internet without permission. Create your own images from scratch, look for images that are public domain, or buy images at a reasonable price from sites like 123rf.com or bigstock.com. If you hire someone, do your research and make sure the artist is not backlogged and knows how to format their work for self-publishing. Fiverr.com can be a good place to find someone.

Step Twelve: Format the Novel

You probably wrote your novel in Word, Google Docs, Scrivner, or other places. But just because you used these platforms doesn’t mean your document is ready to be uploaded to a self-publishing platform. You may need to format chapter headings, font types, spacing, indents, paragraphing, and even page numbers. Follow the instructions of the publishing platform carefully and be sure to do a review before you hit that publish button.

Step Thirteen: Self-Publish the Novel

Publish immediately or do a pre-publishing campaign.

Step Fourteen: Announce Your Novel to the World

Use all your social media and marketing platforms to announce your new novel.

Step Fifteen: Continue to Market

This is an ongoing process. Keep up with your social media sites and continue to market.

Conclusion

Does your head hurt from all this information? You thought writing would be easy, right? These steps can be daunting, but take it one at a time and you’ll do great!

Did I forget anything? If so, please feel free to comment below. And feel free to share your experience with any of these steps.

Creating a Plot Storyboard for your Novel

Posted by Dawn Ross on July 8, 2017
Posted in: Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment
Plot Storyboard

Plot Storyboard – Print this out for your use or use note cards or a writers’ software program like Scrivener.

Remember last week’s post? I gave two tips for helping you get started on writing that book you always wanted to write. One of those two was to create a plot storyboard. Why? Because in order for people to like your novel, you need to have a good plot. With a good plot, even an beginning writer can write a worthwhile story. A plot storyboard can help guide you in developing your plot. Here is a basic plot storyboard outline to help you plan your novel:

  1. Character in a normal world – Don’t make this part too long or boring. In the old days, writers took a lot of time to develop the characters and setting in the first chapter or two. But in today’s world, you want to grab the reader’s attention as soon as possible. I, personally, stick to about half a page and add other details to scenes and characters as the story progresses.
  2. Inciting incident – This is the incident that forces the character to act. For a romance, it could be him meeting a woman who captures his interest. For a mystery, it could be a murder of a friend. For an adventure, it could be a call to war from the authorities.
  3. Character must make a choice – Do they pursue the woman, try to solve the murder on their own, or honor the draft?
  4. Character begins his journey
  5. First complication arises – This is going to be the character’s first indication that the journey is not going to be as easy as he first thought.
  6. Complication grows
  7. A new and larger crisis emerges – This is going to be much larger than the first complication and will cause the character to stop and wonder whether he should go on. It may also send the character in a new direction. This complication will be approximately midway through your story.
  8. Complications increase and become more complex – Your character may want to turn back, but keeps moving forward.
  9. A breaking point complication arises – Your character is going to be at the lowest of the low. The task is going to seem complicated. Your character is going to want to give up. The situation looks hopeless and it’s your character’s darkest moment.
  10. The character decides to finish what he started – Your character needs to go against his natural inclinations and do something he never would have thought of himself doing before. Make sure that whatever it is that instigates him to move forward despite the new and more complicated situation that it’s not a deux ex machina. This is something that miraculously shows up just in the nick of time without any indication previously in the story that this might arise. A deux ex machina would be a sudden change of heart with no explanation or a friend who has had very little interaction in the story suddenly shows up with awesome skills to help.
  11. The drama is resolved – The drama is resolved, the antagonist is defeated, and the character has changed. For a romance, the character is now a person in love. For a mystery, perhaps the character has a darker view of humanity. For an adventure, the character has learned more about the world and more about himself.

This is just a basic storyboard outline. Your story can have more than three increasingly difficult complications, but at least three are needed. And your story can have smaller side-plots. Also, remember not to get too caught up in the planning process. It’s good to plan because it gives you a place to start. But too much planning can cause you to lose steam and you’ll never get to the fun process of writing your book.

Simple Steps to Writing a Novel

Posted by Dawn Ross on January 28, 2017
Posted in: Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Typewriter for Writing a Story

So you have a story in your head and you suddenly feel inspired to write it. You sit down and you open a Word document. The story flashes through your head. The action, the heartache, the drama. But where do you start? How do you start? Suddenly you’re overwhelmed.

While some writers can simply start writing by the seat of their pants (called pantsers), some of us need a little more structure and guidance. If you are one of the later, here are some tips on where to begin.

Firefly Cast of Characters

Establish the Main Characters

If you’ve been thinking about your story for some time, you may already know who your characters are. You may also know things about them such as what they look like, where they work, their strengths and weaknesses, and so on. Either way, you need to create a character journal with all their information. The more important your character is to the story, the more thorough this journal should be.

Dwarves Bilbo and Gandalf in Rivendell Hobbit Movie

Establish the Setting

This is something else you might already have in mind. Creating a journal about it will help you fine tune it. A journal is also a great way to keep track of details later on as you write your story.

Set Up the Story Structure

If you’re having trouble just sitting and writing, having a story structure can help. The first structure you need to consider is the three acts basic acts that most good stories should have. The acts also help you determine your overall plot.

The first act establishes your setting and characters, and then brings about the inciting incident. The inciting incident is the event that rocks your character’s boat, the even that calls for his or her intervention. This incident can be something as simple as a death of a family member to something as cataclysmic as an explosion wiping out half a city. The second act consists of your character trying to resolve the situation only to find it’s not easy. Two steps forward, one step back. The third act contains the climax and the final wrap-up.

I have only given the basics of the three acts. If you’re having trouble with this, there are a ton of books and free online resources that can help.

Notecards for Writing a Story 001

Map Out the Outline

An outline is not the same thing as the story structure described above. The outline consists of the story structure, but it is much more detailed. It doesn’t just help you with your timeline, it also helps you establish important scenes, show you where gaps are, and gives you something to refer to as you write.

I have written an article previously on how using index cards helps me establish an outline – Outlining Your Novel with Index Cards. Make it fun with colored index cards!

Decide the Point of View

This can be a tricky one. Before you write, you really need to know how you plan on telling the story (or showing it, I should say). Here’s an article titled, Point of View Writing. It gives the basics and in an easy-to-understand way. The article states that Third Person, Limited is the most common point of view in fiction. I agree. And it is the point of view I use. I find it the easiest to use and the easiest for readers to fall into. But whichever you use, be sure you are consistent.

Decide the Tense

There are only two choices in writing tense: past tense or present tense. One would think that writing in present tense would be best because it establishes the immediacy of what’s happening. But past tense can work just as well. For some reason, I tend to do my outlines in present tense, but write my novel in past tense. Whichever you choose is fine, just be sure to be consistent. The Write Practice has another great article regarding writing in past tense versus present tense.

Book Time Clock Ticking

Write

This can still be the hardest part. But a friend and fellow writer posted something on her blog recently – Write Bravely. What does it mean? It means write and don’t worry too much about what others think. Don’t worry if your point of view or tense is off or whether you have enough descriptions in your scenes. Just write. You can worry about all that other stuff later.

If finding the time is a problem, make the time. Give up a television show or two. See if your significant other can help take up a chore or two. Even an hour a day is better than nothing. You’re story is never going to get written if you don’t make the time. Here are 10 Ways to Create More Time in Your Day.

Conclusion

Try not to look at novel as one big huge project. Big projects are easier to complete when you break them down into smaller projects. Use the headings I’ve used in this article as mini-projects. Even the heading Write can be broken down. Just take it one chapter at a time. One chapter at a time and you’ll get there. Good luck!

Writing Revision for the Kavakian Empire

Posted by Dawn Ross on October 4, 2014
Posted in: The Dragon Spawn Chronicles. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I’ve gotten a little sidetracked with my story. I haven’t been writing the story because I have been working on the outline. It’s not a basic outline but a very detailed one. You see, I’ve had this story in my head for some time. I know every detail of it. And so I want to write it down so I won’t forget any of those details. I’m also a bit stuck. Let me explain.

Even though I am writing this story for myself, I’ve come to realize that the story I’ve been posting is boring. I don’t have enough tension. So I am considering how I am going to continue in order to keep readers engaged.

One idea I have is to add a little mystery to Jori’s intentions. When I’ve told the story from his perspective, it is easy for the reader to determine what his intensions are. But what if I take out his perspective? What if the reader is just as much in the dark about his intentions as the other characters are? Wouldn’t that add some tension? I certainly think so. He is their enemy. And even though he is a child, he can be dangerous.

While typing out the outline, I have also been reconsidering revising the first few chapters. This is a real process for writers. Often what we write doesn’t come out the way we want and we are constantly rewriting, adding new elements, or taking elements out. If you could edit this story, what would you change?

(I have rewritten chapter 5. Please go back and read it before continuing with the story next week.)