Outlining Again

I finished Chapter 19 today and need to do more research and outlining before Chapter 20. Outlining sounds daunting, but breaking it down into smaller pieces makes it easier. Every book starts with an idea for a book. Most people have a vague idea or concept that it is to be about. For example, a mystery. You know someone will be murdered or some plot will be cooked up that has to be foiled by the good guys. A lot of times, for me, it starts with a part of history I want to write about. I like the mystery format, the unraveling of a mystery, so I start with the time period or characters then think what are they going to try to solve or accomplish. It gets boiled down to this basic premise for a story.

From there I start filling in the pieces. A story always has a beginning, middle, and end. I start thinking what each of those will be. What will be the driving force or question of the novel. From there, it gets easier. You start thinking of characters and subplots. In the beginning you will introduce everything. The middle of a mystery will be the unfolding, investigating, figuring out of the mystery. The end will be bringing it all together and solving or accomplishing the task you started out with in the beginning.

So when I start writing I have a basic outline of where the book is going. I have it broken down into chapters or about how many chapters I hope to accomplish the story in. I allow myself the freedom to change things as I go along if another or better idea comes to me. In my current novel, about a quarter of the way in, I decided another character was needed. I had to go back and add that character’s storyline into the rest of the novel and into the beginning a bit. It has worked out well.

This basic outline will be about paragraph stating what’s going to happen in this chapter to move the plot forward. Every chapter and scene should move the plot forward. Then I outline each of these chapters more in depth. It is a lot like actually writing the book. I’ll have each scene divided out and whose point of view the scene will be from. I usually use multiple points of view. But sometimes it’s all first person. I visualize the scenes and what the characters are going to talk about. Then I actually write it.

At this point, I know there will be two trials in the end of my book, which will conclude after the trials, because that is when all the pieces come together. Each of the trials will have a chapter. The scenes will show the trials and the reactions of the characters to the trials. This particular book will have an epilogue set in the future because historically it wasn’t possible to achieve justice when in a short time frame. Justice came in the future. The epilogue will help tell the fates of the characters and will be the last chapter.

I hope this helps anyone struggling to write their own story and how to outline of figure out what the story will be.