3 of My Favourite Book Outlining Methods

Are you a planner or panster? You may be asking why am I so interested in your plans or your pants? That's completely fine, in the writing world a planner is someone who plans out every single detail of their story from start to finish, while a panter is writing by the set of their pants which some premise in mind. I would say that I'm in the middle of the two.

I'm a plansters, I have all my main story beats outlined and make sure that each of my main characters have their arcs and development outlines but how I get to each of those points is something I discover while I'm writing.

So while I do like the discovery of writing, I also like to have some sort of a plan so I can know where I'm going with my story. There are three outlining methods that I'm liking so far and I'm going to share them with you today.

1. Snow Flake Method

I first heard about this method from K.M Weiland's blog but it was engineered by Randy Ingermanson. It's very in-depth and touches on very specific parts of your story such as the plot, character arcs, and motivation. At first glance, it may seem like a lot of work and a lot of things to think about at first but this is a good way to see the major part of your story and be able to fix plotholes before you even start writing which cuts the amount of time you may spend rewriting and it's really great if all you have for your story is a premise.

So the mechanics of the snowflake method are

1. Write a one sentence story summary

The keyword here is 'sentence', it should be short, so in short, it's your premise that is related to the theme you want to explore.

2. Write a one paragraph summary

This is where you fill in all your main story beats from your inciting incident, to every major plot point, your climax, and then your denouement.

3. Plan your major characters

Begin to plan their names and roles in the story. Make sure, that you give each of your major players' motivations, goals, conflicts both internal and external, and then finally an epiphany or moment of change.

4. Expand your paragraph summary to one page

At this point, you start to expand each of your story beats into one paragraph each. Ingermanson suggests ending each paragraph with a disaster which is kind of like a cliffhanger designed to leave your reader wanting more of the story as they go along and to give you a sounding board as you move from beat to beat.

5. Write your character bibles and character synopses

This is my favourite part of this method, now you create a one-page profile on each of your major characters and half a page for your minor characters. You can do this by going deep into their backstories and giving the reasons for their motivations throughout the story. Then you write a synopsis for each character which outlines their character arc throughout the story.

6. Write your four-page synopsis and your scene list

Here, you take each of your paragraph summaries, and yes, you guessed it, expand them into one page. After that, you can start on a draft scene list where you can plot what happens in each scene.

2. One Page Novel

This is based on one of the oldest story structures designed by Joseph Campbell. I got it from Eva Deverell and with the way she designs it comes off as a nice little craft piece because all you need is one sheet of paper. It's set up like this...

1. Statis

The character is in the ordinary world.

2. Trigger

The call to adventure, internal or external that spurs the character into action.

3. Quest

The character sets off on the journey.

4. Bolt

Something happens to throw the character off their quest.

5. Shift

The character's perspective shifts

6. Defeat

The character faces a defeat.

7. Power

The character comes into their power, this is usually the climax.

8. Resolution

The character returns to the ordinary world, changed.

But the thing about this method is that you plot the story out of order which can be scary at first but also really effective because you can see connections between each part of your story, sort through plot holes, and build a solid narrative framework.

So the sequence you plot with this method is...

1. Resolution

2. Statis

3. Shift

4. Trigger

5. Quest

6. Power

7. Bolt

8. Defeat

3. Three Act Structure

This is an old structure but no less effective. It's basically dividing your story into a beginning, middle, and end with a major plot point happening in each section as follows...

Act 1- Exposition, Inciting incident, First plot point into act two

Act 2- Rising action, Midpoint, Second plot point turning into act three

Act 3- Pre-climax, Climax, Denouement

So these are my three favourite outlining structures. You may be wondering which one I would recommend and frankly, it would depend on the story, or which one you feel more comfortable with you.

What do you think of outlining? Let me know below in the comments.