80
The Lay of the Land
Developing a great outline starts with competitive research. Look at similar books in the genre. What is the arc of their main characters? What is the arc of the story? When I'm designing a nonfiction book, I read every other book I can find on a similar topic. I have read every book about writing fast, dictation, and the structure of a story to see how they are organized.
I merge ten or twenty different tables of contents filled with ideas that I want to include. That initial research gives me the rough skeleton of what I need to create. It tells me the main sections the book has to have.
I then look at the reviews of these books. I want to see what people liked and didn't like about other similar books to be sure I include everything that those reviewers wanted to see. I want to give the audience what they're looking for and answer their deepest questions. I also visit forums and blogs on the topic. I want to see what the audience thinks as much as I see what other authors are saying. I want to connect with what people need to hear and with what people need to know.
81
Emotional Journey
Outlining a fiction book begins with the arc of the plot. Where the story will start and where it will end. Most stories follow a fixed formula. One of the most famous structures is called “The Hero's Journey.”
There are only five or six stories, and we are always writing new variations on these old themes. There is the story of overcoming adversity. There is the story about boy meets girl. There is the story about friendship, and the hero's journey story is one I'm very familiar with because it's the structure that I use for many of my sales letters.
In this sales structure, the hero goes on a journey where they overcame adversity, discovered a cure or solution to their big problem, and now they are here to share that secret with you. You see it in many infomercials and online sale videos. If you have ever wondered why these videos are so compelling, it's because they follow that structure.
Once you've completed your plot arc and your character arcs, you have to begin to build your world and put together the universe that your story occupies. The advantage of writing nonfiction is that the story arc and the character arc are my own journey. I don’t have to create the character purely from my imagination. In this book, it's the journey of someone who had never written a book at thirty to someone who at thirty-five years of age has written dozens of bestsellers and makes a full-time living from writing. That's my character arc.
82
The Flaw
Every main character has to have a flaw or weakness that they overcome throughout their journey so that people can feel a connection with them. Anytime you see a movie, and you realize you hate all the characters, it's usually because the writer didn't give the character a flaw that is sympathetic. “Oh, I'm too handsome. Oh, I'm too rich.” These are not flaws that people find sympathetic because they're not real problems, are they?
A lot of screenwriters and authors make this mistake, and they have no idea they are doing it. They design a flaw that is not sympathetic to regular people. They think that if a character is injured or missing an eye or has some form of physical damage, that's the flaw. But audiences respond to internal imperfections, such as the person is afraid of the water, a person is afraid of themselves, or is afraid of success. They don't believe in themselves. They're not very good at connecting with people. They struggle to speak with people of the opposite gender.
These are the types of flaws that draw readers into a story, and we want to see the hero conquer the weakness as much as we want to see the hero overcome the bad guy.
For a fiction outline, this is the inner layer. The emotional journey is even more important than the series of events.
83
Every Story has a Rhythm
Every story has to follow a series of beats in the correct order. The beats are the rhythm of the story; they are the timing and spacing of events within your story. Once we have our outline, which covers the journey, we want to think about the spacing of events.
Nearly every modern movie is divided into three acts. In the first act, we meet the protagonist, they start to the run into problems, and we find their motivation. In this act, the police officer's partner gets murdered, or the child discovers she has magical abilities.
In the second act, our hero begins to develop and slowly discovers an enemy or an obstacle that must be overcome.
And then comes the third act. That's where our hero faces that final obstacle, and the story seeks resolution.
The more you study good movies and good books, the easier it is to feel the rhythm. You need this experience to feel if your story has the beats in the correct order.
Whether I'm structuring a sales letter or writing a story, I look for a similar story or sales letter, and I mimic the beats of that journey. I want to find a story with a rhythm that I like. Often it can be a story from an entirely different genre, but I like the rhythm, and I look at the order in which things happen.
You can deconstruct a story that you love and find that most follow standard beats:
character discovers he has a problem,
character discovers their best friend,
character discovers their enemy,
character discovers there is a real enemy behind that enemy.
When you create these beats by reverse engineering, it's very easy to write a story that has the right beats. I write my beats from deconstruction, rather than from scratch. Creating beats from scratch can involve a lot of guesswork and leaves an author disappointed without knowing what they did wrong.
My initial outline is composed purely of the beats, without any actual content. The content has nothing to do with the beats. It's simply the story of how things happen. Once you have your beats blocked out, you can begin to form the next layer of your outline or mind map.
84
Good Beginnings
The opening of any story is the most important part, and often we don't meet the main character until the second scene in the movie.
The first scene is the setup for the characters or the problem that the main character will face later. Sometimes the opening scene is something from the character's past. In an action story, we start with the scene where the character is fighting their ultimate enemy. The hero is fighting the villain for a moment before the story jumps back in time to the start of the journey.
On television shows, they often flash a number that says “48” or “72 hours earlier” and then start the second scene at the beginning of the story. We've seen this construct so often that it no longer feels original and is now an accepted way to start a story.
It might seem a little bit obvious in movies and television shows, but when done correctly in a book, it’s still a very effective way to start a story.
The start of the story is critical. A bad first chapter can cause the majority of your readers to put down the book, and they will never find out that it gets better later.
I just started reading a book with really high review scores, but the first chapter was so annoying that I stopped reading. I will never find out if that book gets better.
I change, tweak, rewrite and reorder the first chapter of my book more than any other section. The first sentence is your biggest chance to draw the reader into your story and get them addicted to finding out how it ends.
85
Why People Hate the Main Character
There are a few ways to structure the beats of your story. You can use a traditional story structure, you can use one of the books I recommend on my 20K page, or you can reverse engineer the structure of a story you found compelling.
When I'm designing the structure of a book, I always reverse engineer. That's my approach. I look for something that I think was well done, and I ask a few fundamental questions.
- What was the order of events?
- What types of events happened at each waypoint?
You don't need to create beats fro
m within yourself. That's tough. Almost all stories follow the same rhythm, so you don't need to guess. Trying to guess is how many authors run into trouble and end up with missing beats or getting beats in the wrong order. This is a common problem for many new fiction writers, and I want to be sure you avoid it.
Their biggest mistake starts from creating a character and thinking the tension of a story comes from the character having a nemesis. We can have structural tension within a story, but the emotional journey is why we become invested in the results of that struggle. We only care about good versus evil if we like and can relate to the main character.
The main character's flaw is not that they are fighting against an evil wizard. The flaw is that they don't believe in themselves, that they don't have faith in their friends, that they don't have self-confidence. That's the story that we connect to emotionally.
I've seen some movies that are phenomenal, with amazing action scenes. The arc of events is perfect. But without that arc of character development, the story falls flat.
I recently watched an action movie that, on paper, probably seemed perfect to the director. It should have been flawless, but the character went through no emotional development. He didn't learn anything about himself. He didn’t go through any self-discovery. He simply discovered that he had one more enemy that he had to find and kill. The action was exciting, and yet by the end of the movie I was zoning out. I lost interest. I turned off this big budget movie during the final action scene because I already knew that the hero would win and the villain would die dramatically. I just didn't care.
Without an emotional journey to accompany the physical journey of your story, you will lose your audience.
When you're creating your structure, take the beats and the emotion very seriously or you will alienate your audience.
86
Creating a Deep Outline
There is a phase in between the completion of the outline and your first rough draft which is often called a skeleton or a sketch or a pre-rough draft or a rough outline. In this phase, you turn your outline into more of a structure that's usable.
I start by copying and pasting from my mind map into Scrivener. I copy and paste each section title and the main bullet points. This applies to all of my writing projects, both fiction and nonfiction. No matter what type of book I am writing, the character journey is critical.
When I'm writing a romance novel, the story starts at the beginning and winds its way to the end. I start with the scene where my female hero first meets the love interest, the guy that makes her crazy, but then eventually something will happen to change that. The story must start with conflict. She can't start out liking him immediately; she has to start out with dislike, so that becomes the hurdle she must overcome.
A book needs conflict.
When developing the skeleton, I might write a few notes about what's going to be in each section.
Meet the love interest.
His name.
The reason she doesn't like him.
His main character traits (attractive but arrogant).
I start with a few key notes, and I build on those to create my deep outline. As I add more detail and bullet points, this rough outline transitions into a full skeleton or deep sketch. When I'm writing the book, I want more than just section headings to work with. The bullet points I'm adding here become the waypoints that I travel through when I'm writing the book. The deeper your outline, the faster your writing phase will become. This structure makes it very easy to write each little section later.
The outline I have for this book is very, very extensive. I put together a ton of notes for each different section and chapter. Before I record a section, I quickly look at my notes to remember the things I want to cover.
My outline has far more information than just section titles; I have loads of notes to cover each waypoint and make this process as easy as possible. When I'm dictating, I don't want to waste time making decisions or deciding what I wanted to cover when I first made the outline.
How many times have you left a blank spot in a draft and later on forgot what you meant to write there?
I prefer to outline in circles with a mind map. As you travel out from the center, each layer is more detailed and one step closer to bringing the entire story to life. You can think of outlining as creating a monster. You keep adding layers. First, you make the monster's skeleton; then you add the organs; then the muscle; then the blood vessels; finally, you add the skin.
If you don't like thinking about monsters, you can use any metaphor you like for creating your outlines. You can think of it as adding layers to an onion or building a bridge if you prefer.
It's easier to create by layers than it is to start at the beginning of your story and just create everything as you go all at once. Writing by the seat of your pants is much slower because you are constantly making decisions while you are writing. It is very hard to generate character development, story arcs, conflict, scenes, and an emotional journey all on the fly.
The more you prepare each different layer before you get to the writing phase, the easier and faster it will become, and the better your stories will be. People should be able to read your sketch and know if they like your story. You can create this sketch much faster than a rough draft. Show your deep outline to your early readers, and they'll tell you if something critical is missing from the story.
Even with only bullet points in your draft, most readers will notice if there is something wrong with the structure of your story.
They'll say things like, “I don't like the main character,” or, “I don't really care what happens to this character.” When you hear things like that, you know something is missing. If they mention not being invested in the main character, you know there is a flaw in the emotional journey. If there is a mistake in your beats, you can take care of it now. It's a lot easier to correct structural problems before you have written a hundred thousand words. If you wait until you've written the first draft, diagnosing and repairing problems is a nightmare. You do not want to have to rewrite entire chapters.
The beauty of this technique is that it allows you to get this critical feedback before you put in all that time writing. In addition to writing your book faster, you will now also know that you are writing the right words. Getting early feedback allows you to pivot and save yourself massive amounts of time during that critical and brutal rewriting phase.
87
The Rough Draft
When your sketch is complete, it's time to write the rough draft. Writing a rough draft is really about free form. Worrying about spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, and little errors will slow you down. If you keep going back and fixing things, you lose massive amounts of time.
Keep your editing and writing phases separate. We want to break your writing process into three discrete phases. We have completed the outlining phase and are beginning the writing phase. The editing and correction phase comes later, so don’t worry about that now.
After I complete my mind map, I often change around the order of chapters and sections. You may find that you shift the order of your scenes or want to move different parts of your story during the outlining phase, during the pre-rough draft phase, and again after you write your rough draft. The great thing about modern software tools is it's very easy to change the order of everything. I have changed the order of this book nearly a dozen times now. I am always shifting sections in search of perfection.
When creating your initial structure, you focus on the order that you like the most rather than how the audience will react. As you go further into your creative process, you will notice that certain sections make more sense next to each other. Eventually, your focus moves from your writing experience to that of the reader. We want to organize our stories in a way that the audience will connect with and react to.
If you skip over deep outlining, creating beats, or working on your sketch to get right to the rough draft, it’s only going to slow you
down and leave holes in your story development. We write in this order to make your process faster and more efficient.
We want our readers to experience an emotional journey throughout the book; highs and lows, ups and downs. That's how people connect with stories. That's why storytelling can be so compelling.
If you've hit writer's block, if you've written thousands of words that you're unhappy with, or if you struggle to finish a book, it always comes down to lack of preparation and outlining.
Only after you complete the research phase does the artistry of writing come into place. Ninety percent of excellent writing is the science of research, but that final ten percent is art.
Some new writers are tempted to work from really light outlines and the roughest of sketches. They have this mistaken belief that writing this way is pure and that using a more scientific method is unclean. As though any reader can tell what method you used to create your book.
Some writers can create beats without needing an outline. They have an unbelievable natural ability to create amazing stories on the fly. There are also people born with perfect pitch. They can instantly sing any song they hear flawlessly. But that doesn't mean that we can learn how to do it ourselves. These people are born with great natural talents.
Do not base your writing strategy upon outliers and exceptions. Just because someone can run a four-minute mile doesn't automatically mean that I can run that fast. Great people exist in every different field, and they make it look so easy. Some people have a natural ability to create beats within their hearts, within their souls, without needing to look at anything else, but they are the exception.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 10