Outlines are time management tools that can save many an author ample amounts of cash, writing hours, and headache. If you’ve been consistently told by professionals that your manuscripts need extensive services, felt like you spent way too much time in self-revisions simply because your ideas while writing were all over the place, or have repeatedly written yourself into a corner while creating your manuscript, using an outline could help with one or all of these issues.
WHAT IS AN OUTLINE?
An outline is simply a general list of what is going to be included in your manuscript, often in the order in which it will be written.
For example, an outline for Little Red Riding Hood might look like:
- Red leaves home with food and medicine for Granny.
- Red and her Granny are swallowed up (☺) by the wolf.
- Red and her Granny are cut out of the wolf’s stomach by the hunter.
While writing, you’ll be filling in the gaps, fleshing out characters, and adding more worldbuilding details, but there are writers who could create a basic three-point outline like this in about two minutes and that’s all they would need to finish their manuscript, whether it be a short story or an epic-length novel.
Outlines can also be much more detailed. The kinds of outlines I create tend to be more detailed because my brain has an easier time of writing out a manuscript if I have already organized my thoughts, leaving me to focus only on how to express those ideas once I actually start writing the book. Here’s an example using the same story.
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Little Red Riding Hood |
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Chapter |
Scene |
Events |
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1 |
1 |
Hunter and his party are out in the woods looking for a pack of wolves that was sighted near the village (express this through dialogue).
They hear nothing at first as they reach the spot where the pack was last seen. Then they hear pounding as some large, heavy animals come toward them. The largest wolves they’ve ever seen.
The one headed for Hunter’s face dives into the air above him and he falls onto his back and blindly fires toward the animal before everything goes black. |
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2 |
Red wakes up to the smell of pancakes and bacon. She walks out into the kitchen, sad at seeing the empty third seat at their table (where her father used to sit), and snatches a slice of bacon out of the pan before her mother can slap her hand away.
Mother chides Red for being so impulsive and impatient. Mother stares at the third chair for a moment as well and goes quiet. She serves breakfast to Red and sits down to eat her own meal. She tells Red that someone from the village is coming to patch their roof before the next rain, but she promised Granny she’d send her some medicine because she hasn’t been feeling well.
If Red promises to go straight there and not stop and swears she won’t talk to any strangers along the way, mother will let her go alone to grandmother’s house with the delivery.
Red excitedly promises, downs the rest of her food, and gets up to get dressed. |
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2 |
1 |
Hunter wakes up in an unfamiliar place. He tries to sit up and feels the pain of his battered body. He’s at Granny’s house, a fellow survivor having dragged him there after the wolf he killed landed on top of him. He’s been out for a few hours.
Granny brings him some tea and cookies and says he can rest as long as he needs to. But he wants to get going to make sure the wolves are taken care of as soon as possible in order to protect the village.
He and his friend leave and tell Granny to stay inside until they come tell her that it’s safe. She agrees and shuts herself up in her house.
The men walk away discussing what happened in the clearing. There were at least eight wolves and they went back to the clearing to find seven bodies. There’s one missing. It could be anywhere. They call for help clearing away the wolves and the dead. A few injured men are still laying in place, resting with broken bones and claw marks. Hunter sees paw prints leading back toward the village. |
And outlines can look like anything in between. One major misunderstanding that I think a lot of newbie writers have about outlines is they think outlines aren’t customizable. Another is that outlines are set in stone and can’t change for some reason. At least for me, all of my outlining is flexible. I use outlines as living documents that change to reflect adjustments I make to the manuscript, so I always have an accurate list of what’s included in the book. This helps with everything from creating a synopsis and managing continuity within a series to coming up with advertising copy or creating a succinct query letter (for those still attempting the traditional publishing route).
How Outlines Save Cash
When you start writing your first draft with a list of relatively organized thoughts, your manuscript tends to be more organized as well. This reduces character inconsistencies, plot holes, and other fiction problems. For nonfiction, such as self-help, outlining is a great way to make sure you put things in an order that helps with understanding and retaining the provided information, and it gives you a “zoomed out” view of the work so that you can determine if you covered everything you meant to, repeated yourself excessively, and so on.
This turns into cash when it comes to buying editing services. When you have a more organized first draft, it’s going to be faster and easier to edit. Meaning you’ll likely pay a lot less to your various professionals. A past client of mine, who hadn’t used an outline, ended up paying me nearly $7,000 for developmental editing for a self-help piece about a single, basic communications concept. Yet, the manuscript was well over 150,000 words long. My editor sense went berserk when I heard that, and I was ready to bet big money that the writer had gone off on tangents throughout the piece and / or repeated themselves heavily. These are both things that, if the writer had simply used an outline, could have been easily avoided. Even if they had just done a single round of self-revisions after writing such a bloated piece, they could have saved themselves at least six grand in this situation by finding and removing what ended up being well over 110,000 words of nearly verbatim repetition and nonsensical tangents that were much more distracting and confusing than they were relevant or clarifying.
I hope that not using an outline or not doing self-revisions wouldn’t mean risking quite this much money for you. But, if by using an outline, you could save even a few hundred dollars, I think that’s worth spending somewhere between a few minutes and a couple of days creating an outline. Those few hundred dollars could go toward cover design, buying ads, purchasing more copies of your book to sell, or just buying some books you like for recreational reading.
How Outlines Save Time
As noted above, you won’t usually spend as long writing a manuscript if you already have a solid idea of which concepts go where. You can therefore save anywhere from a few hours to a few months of time on self-revisions or on waiting for your professional editing services to be completed. Shaving off a few weeks here and a month or two there can quickly add up to you saving multiple months of time throughout your entire book development process (for example, instead of 11 months between typing the first word and publishing the finished product, it could take 8 months). Finishing faster means you publish more frequently, which is great for both you and your audience, especially if you’re actively enhancing the quality of your work while you’re simultaneously able to produce it more quickly. Everybody wins!
How Outlines Reduce Stress
Many new writers who don’t outline run into something they call “writer’s block.” Whenever I’ve heard this term used, the newbie writer describes what amounts to the fact that they started writing with no plan and now they’re stuck. This is similar to heading off in a random direction—though you’re trying to get to a specific destination—and finding yourself lost in the backroads of an area of town you didn’t know existed.
This feeling of being “blocked” or “stuck” can tank entire writing careers and even push people to trash entire projects because they haven’t thought through what comes next in the story or the content. By outlining so that your thoughts are organized before you start writing, you have a good chance of not experiencing this while writing. Or, even if you do run into a plot hole you missed during outlining, the level of thought you’ve already put into the rest of the plot will often make coming up with a solution faster and less stressful.
For new and seasoned writers who find themselves running into the issues mentioned above, using an outline can be a fast, free, and simple way to start alleviating some of those symptoms and make writing a little more fun and a little less frustrating.
For guidance on how to start using outlines for whatever piece you’re currently working on, visit WeCanPub.com for free lessons on outlining that will walk you through the process step by step.
Happy planning! ♥