Outlines

@allison-grace I follow the system taught by K.M.Wieland. It’s excellent as many others on here will testify. She has written several books on the subject and she has a series of articles on her blog covering the subject as well.

In her system, there are 18 major plot points. I like to have all of these down before I start writing. On top of this, I like to have a dozen or so random scene ideas. Give or take a little planning, that’s when I feel ready to start writing.

As I start, the characters and world come alive to me. This helps as I continue to flesh out what the rest of the story will be like. Whenever I write a new chapter, I will first list out a bullet point outline of generally what is going to happen. I will also start thinking about what is going to happen in the next chapter or two so I can prepare for that.

At the moment, I happen to be outlining a fantasy trilogy and I believe it is going to require more work from me than normal. First, it is a trilogy so I have to outline the basic plot points of the whole story before I can dig deeper into outlining book one. Plus, these books are going to be longer than the ones I’ve written before, so I feel I will have to do a more thorough outline to be fully prepared before I start writing. The fantasy world itself needs to be outlined too. I’ll need to know the shape of the world, which countries border which, what general route my characters will take in their journey, etc etc. Plus, I have to outline what magic will exist in my world so I will know my characters abilities and structure the plot accordingly. I may even develop a few languages to make sure the different ethnic groups have distinct styles for their city names and people names. Yeah, epic fantasy is not the easy way to go. 😉