How I Outlined My Book and Got It Ready to Publish
Outlining is a daunting enough task. As writers, we’re likely to forget information or plot elements we want to add, so we use documents, or sticky notes, a notebook, or bulletin boards to help with the step-by-step process. With all of this weighing on newbie writers, I’m going to outline exactly how I outlined my upcoming debut Heart of Skulls.
When it comes to drafting, I cannot stand Google docs. I used Word documents for the longest time and now that my day job involves looking at Word docs, I’m glad I ended up switching to Scrivener. Before Scrivener, I used to keep notes in the Notes app on my Mac. It was a disorganized mess and I couldn’t find anything when I needed it.
With Scrivener, I keep all of my notes, research, and outlines in one place. Now I only jot things down in notebooks for when I’m revising.
But with Scrivener, I have a place to keep notes, websites I’m using for research, a synopsis area for what I want to have happen in the chapter, and even a section to keep all my deleted lines. Just in case. Saving everything I delete has saved my life more times than I can count on one hand.
Being able to use all of these tools was incredibly helpful during drafting because I was able to keep up where I was and where I wanted to go. Most of the time, I have bullet point ideas, but when I would walk away from my book for weeks or months at a time, having an outline of what needed to happen in the chapter and even the next three chapters was incredibly helpful.
Now, when it came to the revision stage, I ended up doing a heavy developmental edit on my own book. I did this about a year after finishing the second draft, and only felt comfortable doing it because of my background as an editor and because I’d spent enough time away from the story that I could treat myself like a client.
It was also because I was using a method called book mapping. Book mapping is a method of plotting out plot, subplots, action, and/or themes of the story. This is a method used by developmental editors to keep track of everything that occurs, when, how, and what the effect of consequences are.
My second draft was awful, so practicing this method on Heart of Skulls saved my book.
Cameron Montague Taylor of https://www.cameronmontaguetaylor.com/editing/ was kind enough to share this with me when I was a baby developmental editor
