Outlines: The Road Map for Your Work

Starting with the structure of your work not only strengthens your writing, it can also save you time and effort down the road. But where should you organize all of your ideas? This week we’ll be looking into writing outlines.

In this post:

• A case for outlines

• One size doesn’t fit all

• Big ideas

• Drilling down

• Zooming out again

• After the outline

A case for outlines

Back in my university days, I was plagued with the all-too-familiar spectre of procrastination (or what initially presented as procrastination, but that’s another story). Deadlines for papers loomed just beyond the horizon. I knew they were coming, and I knew myself well enough to know I had to at least get the ball rolling. So, after I’d done my initial research and gathered my sources, I would put my thoughts in an outline. This way I was able to get a sense of what I wanted to say, and I’d no longer be staring at a blank page.

This was important because, more often than not, inertia would settle in at some point and suddenly it would be the day or two before the due date. Cue scramble, right? Well… yes, though it was a more manageable scramble. I had an outline, after all. And even if I had to put thoughts into complete sentences and make sure everything flowed properly, the majority of the work was already done.

Blank-page terror can stop the best of us in our tracks, but if we break down what we’re doing into chunks, it gets a whole lot less scary. After the initial idea generation, outlines are a great step to take. They can be as exacting or as messy as we want them to be. The beauty is that no one else need see it.

The other beautiful thing about outlines is that they can help automate recurring tasks (like this blog, for instance). Every week I know I’ll have a topic that I need to break into smaller chunks which I can brainstorm ahead of time. This has the added benefit of organizing the content for readers, and it makes it a lot easier for me to intervene early on if something just isn’t working.

One size doesn’t fit all

It should be said that one size never fits all with any kind of writing technique, including this one. Some folks like discovering as they go and refining later. But lest we forget, an outline can also be unique to your process.

Maybe you like to start small, with general bullet points about your plot and where it’s going. That’s an outline. Maybe you have a full treatment on each chapter before you start. That’s also an outline. Maybe you like using sticky notes on the wall, or a program like Evernote. Guess what? Both of those are outlines too. Maybe your outline is simply bouncing around in your head in a more ephemeral way than any of those. That counts.

The point is, thinking ahead, no matter how you do it, eases the whole process that follows. So maybe step back for a minute.

Big ideas

And stepping back is a great place to start. Think of this stage as wrangling your ideas. What you want to accomplish with your writing along with any important notes from your research make for excellent bullet points.

Start with the big ideas that will form the overall shape of the piece. Think about it like plotting out a route on a road trip. You want to make sure you hit certain locations—towns and attractions. Those are the segments of your writing.

What does your main character need to do over the course of the story? What is their arch? What do you want your readers to take away from your article? Are there any key points you have to establish first before you get to your argument?

Consider everything you can at this stage. Make the big ideas big, whether that’s bolding them on your computer, or making them a fluorescent colour sticky note.

Drilling down

After your big ideas, or the road trip attractions, are the highway pit stops to refuel and grab a bite. These are how we flesh out and connect ideas. Maybe you like to wing it and you’ll stop somewhere when you need to, but you might want to at least set aside some space for these stops.

If the big ideas are your headings—your What—then drilling down means you’re filling out the other details like Who, When, Where, Why and How. What are the smaller points that make up the big one? Is there a particular piece of research that belongs under one of the big ideas? Once you start sorting these, pretty soon you’ll have robust bullet points that you could swear are starting to resemble paragraphs or story beats.

Example:

Big IDEA/What: Ali (Who) meets their romantic interest (Who)

• It’s an afternoon in May (When)

• Ali needed to go to the store to buy eggs (Where)

• At the store, Ali is careless and runs headlong into their love interest, smashing the eggs in the process (Why/How)

In the example above, you’ll notice that there is a general sense of what should happen in this chapter, but not everything is rendered in excruciating detail. I haven’t even filled in what happens after the egg-smashing, maybe because I want to discover it as I write. Some details (like it being May) might not even feature in the actual chapter—it’s just for me to know as the writer. The point is, how deep you go is up to you, but having these anchors will help get the creative juices flowing when you sit down to actually write.

Zooming out again

Once you have your outline, you might want to put it aside for a time and come back to it later. Like all things in writing, your outline can benefit from a good review. Think of it as a stress-test for the piece.

Some of the questions you might ask yourself are:

• Does this progression make sense to me?

• Will it make sense to someone else?

• Is the conflict or drama best served with the events in this current order?

• Do the characters’ motivations seem realistic, or do I need to flesh these out earlier?

• Does the presentation flow properly or am I missing important context?

• Should I back this part up with more research?

This is where visuals like sticky notes, a slide deck or printing out a digital outline can really help. Try to look at your outline as a cohesive piece and poke holes in the weaker spots so you know where you’ll need to shore up.

After the outline

Once you’ve finished your outline, give yourself a pat on the back. Seriously. It’s a major accomplishment and you’ve set your future self up for success.

All you’ll need to focus on now is creating the connective tissue between these elements, drawing them together and ensuring there’s a clear thread, or line on your map throughout the entire work.

And remember, even if you’ve planned things rigorously, the process can still surprise you. There’s always plenty of room for happy accidents along the way.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.