How to Plot and Outline Your Story.

Introduction

It’s time. You have your world and setting done. Characters’ cast is ready, their profiles filled up. Now you prepared to write a story. Beside one crucial thing.

The plot. Before writing a first draft, it would be helpful to know in advance what would happen in the story. You, sure, can take the approach of discovery writing and find your story as you write it. But some people like me need to know at least some spoilers to their own plot.

Let’s find out the way to plot and outline your story.

Brainstorm.

Nothing happens without a good old brainstorm. No matter how you look, this is one of the most helpful activities in any creative process. Here are some tips on how to do it when figuring out the plot.

Notebook at the reach of your hand is a lifeline. That advice is obvious, boring even, but it would save you in a pinch of a sudden insight. Some people believe that a good idea would stick with you anyway, so writing it in a notebook is a waste of time. I don’t believe so. I personally would waste time writing things down, then spend it on futile attempts to remember it.

When you are in a writing frenzy, write any idea, even the silliest one. You can toss them aside later, when you will organize this mess. Now it’s better to have a pile of rubbish ideas and one diamond in it, than trying to fish out that one brilliant idea that could end up being useless.

No organization. No. Nope. On this stage, write everything as it goes. One idea will lead you to another and another and so on. When your enthusiasm will diminish a little, you would have time to make sense of your notes.

Having where to write, write everything down, and give it to flow is the best thing you can do on a brainstorming stage. When you feel that you have enough for that day, it is time to make sense of this mess.

Organize.

This stage is a one tedious bastard, but we need to do it. We need to make sense of our brainstorming fervour and ideas it produced. Goal here is to weed out everything that does not fit into the story and make navigable the rest of it.

Idea rejecting is a straightforward process, though it depends a little on a work you did before getting to the plot. Check your notes on a setting and characters and throw away everything that doesn’t correspond with it. Though spare ideas that are kinda out of place but make sense and make the story better, you can figure something out with them. But here, you need to make a judgment call.

After you weeded out, everything that made little sense is time to give a proper shape to what remained. The safest bet would be to organize your notes while keeping a story structure of choice in your mind.

Layout would differ a little depending on a story structure you picked, but the rest of a process is the same. Place individual notes in the act where you think they belong. That one is easy mostly because you more or less write ideas in chronological order, at least at first. After, try to break them into chapters. Though, right now, don’t think too hard on it, that you are supposed to do in the next part, just vaguely place your notes where they could belong. You anyway will rewrite it a bunch of times so it’s fine if you are not precise.

To make navigation easier, use headings. I am currently working in google docs, because it’s free. Headings help in organization immensely and create hierarchy, use them! If your story is a big one, you will be grateful for that in the feature.

At the end of the organization phase, you will have something vaguely resembling a story outline. Though now it is full of holes and empty spots. In the next phase is a time to elaborate existing ideas and patch up holes in a plot. Some would remain anyway but that inevitable, le sight.

Build on top of it.

Now we get to the bottom of it. You have your ideas set and organized and you have a lot of dark spots everywhere. We need to fix it.

In this phase you need to work with a story structure even closer ( 3-Arc structure, Hero Journey, Dan Harmon’s Circle, etc. It’s up to you which one to choose). Believe me if you work closely with structure you save a lot of headache of unflipping your story in the future.

When working like this, first you need to pay attention to all major plot points of your story: inciting incident, plot points 1–2, midpoint and climax. You need to know them, what happened there. When you do, build the remaining plot would be way easier, just carve a path from one point to another, one story bit at a time.

Don’t stuck on one part for too long if it gives you trouble, move on, later you will return. Work in iterations. Get through your story outline and then one more, maybe another one as well. Each time it would give you more insight in the story. You will build a proper map of your plot, which soon will guide you through a drafting phase of story writing.

This shouldn’t take you long by the way, don’t get stuck on this phase by trying to perfect the plot, you won’t anyway. Eventually you will return to your story outline/map and tweak it a little, considering fresh developments and stuff you didn’t foresight.

About tweaks, by the way. Don’t make your outline too detailed, it’s a recipe for disaster. Leave a wiggle room for new developments, for fresh ideas; and if you will underestimate a story at some point, like a certain fella, you would have a room for rework. But better do it right from the start, re-work is a pain in the ass.

After you finish mapping/outlining your story, check how cohesive it is. Especially check how well its structure holds. Remaking the structure of the story later in development would be hard, check it twice or even three times. If everything is okay, you are ready to go.

Conclusion.

When you work on you story plot, work in iterations. Brainstorm, organize, build on top of it. You wouldn’t do it once and have a well outlined story no. You will make one outline then probably edit it, then you will write a draft and then edit the outline cause add something that wasn’t there and so on.

Just keep thinking of your story and keep a hand on it’s reins to guide it when you want to be. Never forget to guide a story and map it.