Each writer has their own process. Some writers (often called pantsers) believe that outlining their novel limits their creativity, while others require a detailed map before beginning their novel’s first draft.
In this article, I will go over the purpose of a novel outline and hopefully demystify the process by showing you how to marry the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure to help you write the most dynamic and compelling story yet.
A novel outline is a flexible tool that helps writers shape character, theme, and transformation without stifling creativity, balancing imagination with story structure. By focusing on your protagonist’s dilemma and inner shift rather than rigidly plotting things out, an outline allows a meaningful story to emerge naturally while avoiding shapeless or stalled drafts.
The purpose of an outline
A novel outline helps you to plan out your novel’s structure, characters, setting, plot, and more.
Outlining a novel can be a double-edged sword however, particularly if you approach it strictly as plotting. The plot is the vehicle that carries your theme, so if you merely focus on creating a compelling plot, at some point you will lose connection to your theme — to why you are telling the story.
A number of creative writers resist the outlining process with the mistaken belief that structure will limit their creativity and lead to formulaic writing. But I believe the opposite is true.
On the one hand, if you over-outline you rule out any surprises along the way. Yet, eschewing an outline can lead to a shapeless narrative that goes nowhere. Some of my students join my 90-Day Novel workshop despairing that they’ve spent months, years, and yes even decades (you know who you are!) in a fruitless struggle to corral the story in their mind into a coherent narrative.
The goal in creating an outline for your novel is to help you see beyond your idea of your story, to the truth of the story.
“No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”
– William Goldman
What is an outline?
Before we go on, let’s explore what an outline is and is not.
Outlining is:
- A search for transformation
- An exploration into the truth of a particular aspect of our common humanity
- Connecting to your protagonist’s dilemma in order to dramatize their shift in perception
- Allowing your characters to live by marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure
Outlining is not:
- A rigid document that you cannot stray from
- Focusing on plot with little regard for the truth of your characters’ experience
- Binding your story to a thinly explored idea
There are multiple outlining techniques such as beat sheets, mind mapping, or using the snowflake method, to name a few. Whether you swear by a particular method or not, outlines are meant to be fluid. Think of them as a living document where you are marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure.
What you are aiming to achieve in outlining a novel is to develop a relationship to what you’re attempting to express through exploring the characters in conflict. The goal with any well-told story is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
5 steps to create your outline
1. Move from the general to the specific
The process of building a novel involves moving from the general to the specific. Every story first arrives as the seed of an idea, a character or a premise. The first step involves simply allowing yourself to imagine the world you’re creating by envisioning your characters in relation to each other. The first month of the 90-day novel workshop focuses on daily stream-of-consciousness writing prompts that allow your characters to come alive.
2. Imagining the world of your story
The next step is to begin imagining the world of your story. It’s important to remember that your characters aren’t simply chess pieces you move around the board until you’ve reached checkmate. They are dynamic, complex, and often filled with contradictions.
This is why I’m not a proponent of character sketches. Your characters don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in relationship to other characters, thus character sketches tend to reduce your characters to a series of traits or behaviors. The truth is, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink, “We would like to believe that human beings behave characteristically, because it makes us feel safe . . . but we don’t. We behave situationally.”
Your idea of the story is never the whole story. It’s not that your idea is incorrect, it is that it is incomplete.
Therefore, a plot is not simply a series of events that your protagonist goes through. It is the vehicle that carries your protagonist to their transformation. In other words, if you dropped another character into your story’s premise, the story would not work. If, for example, you replaced George Bailey with Hannibal Lector in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, the premise would instantly fall apart because George is actually a function of the dramatic question — his character is intrinsic to the plot.
Drama is essentially characters behaving uncharacteristically. In spite of the fact that George Bailey is ambitious and desperately wants to leave Bedford Falls, circumstances force him to squash his dreams.
3. Character suggests plot
With each idea or image that emerges, allow yourself to ruminate on the question, “What happens next?” without feeling like you must immediately start shaping a plot. By doing this, you are giving your subconscious free rein to play and imagine and explore without trying to put a frame around your story too early.
As your characters begin to reveal themselves to you, ask yourself these questions.
- What does my protagonist want?
- What does my protagonist need?
- What is their dilemma?
- What is their obstacle?
4. Your theme is explored through a dilemma
The purpose of any well told story is to reveal a transformation. A transformation is simply a shift in perception. By the end of the story, your protagonist sees their situation in a new way. This is why approaching your outline as a way of trying to figure out your plot so often ends up as an exercise in frustration. Remember what Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created the problem.”
This is true for story. Your story begins with a central question (sometimes called your dramatic problem, or your theme.) This central question gets dramatized as a dilemma. For example:
“How can I be free?”
“What does it mean to succeed?”
“What is my purpose in life?”
“Where do I belong?”
There are two ingredients to a dilemma:
- A powerful desire
- A false belief.
Notice that what your protagonist wants is always outside of themselves, while what they need is always within. For example, I will be free when I escape, or I will succeed when I make millions of dollars, or my purpose in life is to be happy, or I want to belong to that exclusive country club. This is what we all do as human beings. We have conscious goals to fulfill unconscious desires.
Think of it like this: problems are solved, while dilemmas can only be resolved through a shift in perception.
So, here’s the thing to remember: You know you have a story when what your protagonist wants is impossible to achieve based on their current approach (thus necessitating a new perspective.) As long as George Bailey thinks that a wonderful life can only be achieved through leaving Bedford Falls, he will never be happy.
Rather than trying to figure out how to get to the end of your story, remember that the ace you have up your sleeve is that your protagonist is going to die to their old identity at the end of Act Two. In doing so, they will be reborn in the beginning of Act Three to pursue what they need as opposed to what they want.
But if all that happens in your story is that your protagonist solves their problem by getting what they want, your audience will be disappointed. If George Bailey actually succeeded and left Bedford Falls at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, we would be extremely bummed. Story is not about solving a problem — it’s about resolving the protagonist’s dilemma by reframing their goal.
As you explore the story-structure questions, you will begin to notice a dilemma emerging for your protagonist. This dilemma is connected to a primal desire (theme) for your protagonist, such as success, meaning, purpose, belonging, validation, survival or connection.
A dilemma is a problem that cannot be solved without creating a new problem, and it is the throughline of your narrative. As you connect to your protagonist’s dilemma, investigate the story-structure questions so you can allow an outline to emerge.
5. Allow an outline to emerge
Story structure is frequently taught by story analysts as a conceptual model, but the structure being alluded to is not really the plot, but is in fact the internal DNA of your protagonist’s transformation. Since the purpose of the story is to reveal a transformation, everything that happens in your story is moving your protagonist inexorably toward some kind of new understanding or shift in perception.
Therefore, the structure questions are not conceptual, but rather, experiential, and are designed to track the major set of experiences that lead to your protagonist’s transformation.
As you explore the structure questions further, you will begin to notice that your protagonist’s primal desire is alive through the entire story — in fact, it is the beating heart of your narrative, and you can connect this desire to each major experience. If your protagonist is seeking belonging, for example, you will discover that the desire to belong never goes away, but that it gets reframed by the end. Perhaps the protagonist believed that belonging meant being accepted by a group, or by their family, but by the end they may discover that true belonging can only happen when they accept themselves. And by accepting themselves, they naturally move in the direction of where they truly belong.
Your story weapon: The power of outlining your novel
As you sit down to outline, don’t concern yourself with writing prose. At this point you are simply imaging the world, exploring the dilemma, inquiring into the characters and allowing an outline to emerge through the story structure questions.
Avoid pointlessly laboring for months, refining scenes and scenarios that never make the final draft. You don’t want to become bound by a single plot at the risk of creating a static story with an obligingly passive protagonist.
There is magic in the process of story creation and it cannot be reduced to a one size fits all outlining method. Once you see that the plot is simply the vehicle that tracks a character’s inner quest, you begin to surrender your story to the characters. By allowing yourself to marry the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of structure, a dynamic story begins to emerge.
Are you looking for more guidance and support in outlining your novel? Join my next 90-Day Novel, Story Day or 30-Day Outline workshop.
