Outlining Your Novel_Map Your Way to Success

by K. M. Weiland

  It’s beyond the scope of this book to discuss story structure in detail (see my book Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story for that), but let’s take a look at a quick checklist of the structural possibilities for the beginning, middle, and end of your story. Keep in mind your outline doesn’t need to contain all of these elements. Consider the following, but always listen to the needs of your story.

  Beginning

  • Begin with the main character (the MC), so readers immediately understand who this story is about.

  • Show readers the MC’s “normal world.” This is the life he has chosen to live, the life in which he’s reasonably comfortable or at least complacent.

  • Show readers the MC in a “characteristic moment.” Try to create a scene that exhibits both the MC’s prominent personality trait and an activity that will feature later in the story.

  • Begin with movement. From the first moment readers see him, the MC should be in action. No sitting around, staring at the scenery.

  • Give readers a reason to care about or empathize with the MC. Is he brave, smart, tough, kind, funny? Show readers this is a character they’re going to enjoy spending time with.

  • Give the MC a desire and a goal. What does he want in life? What does he believe he must accomplish in order to achieve that desire?

  • Create an inciting event that forever changes the MC’s status quo. Rock the character’s world in a way he didn’t see coming. Perhaps his family is murdered. Perhaps he is caught cheating on an important test. Or perhaps he unexpectedly time travels twenty years into the future.

  • Force the MC to react to the inciting event. The inciting event doesn’t matter until the protagonist reacts to it. How he chooses to react will set the tone for the story to follow.

  Middle

  • Trap the MC in a spiral of events outside of his control. Set the line of dominoes in motion.

  • Force the MC’s original goal out of his reach. He can still see it and certainly still wants it, but he can’t reach it.

  • Give the MC new goals. The MC’s primary goal shifts to the background as he struggles to stay afloat with all the complications coming his way.

  • Cause the MC to make a decision that shifts him from reacting to the antagonist into full-blown attack mode. He’s tired of just sitting there and taking it. Now he’s got a plan and he’s ready to fight back.

  Ending

  • Bring the MC to a new understanding of himself (particularly his fatal flaw) and how he needs to become someone better to defeat his antagonist. The most powerful stories are those in which the MC can’t obtain physical victory without also obtaining a mental and moral victory within himself.

  • Stretch your MC’s resolve (physically, mentally, and morally) to the breaking point. Battles should never be easily won. Keep readers in doubt of the hero’s ability to triumph.

  • Revive the MC at the last moment. Just as the reader thinks the MC is about to cave under the pressure, let him bounce back.

  • Transform the MC into a hero. He should dig down deep inside, find a spark of extraordinariness, and rise to the challenge.

  • Force the MC to respond in a unique way. How can he respond to the climactic forces in a way distinctive to his personality?

  • Show the MC defeating the opponent. Or not, depending on your story. But, either way, the battle between your hero and the antagonist should come to a definitive conclusion.

  • Let the MC reach his goals. Assuming your story is one in which the hero triumphs, the MC will be able to move past the now-defeated antagonist to achieve the goals that have eluded him throughout the story. Perhaps he finds peace in the aftermath of his family’s deaths. Perhaps, now having repented of cheating, he studies for the test, retakes it, and gets that A he needs. Perhaps he comes to grips with his new time-traveling power and uses it to improve his ability to live in the present.

  • End with a memorable line. Readers will remember the ending more than any other part of your story, so make it unforgettable!

  Three Fundamental Elements of Story

  Once your beginning, middle, and ending form a skeleton strong enough to hold your story upright, it’s time to begin adding muscle and flesh, in the form of relationships, action, and humor. Take a gander at your bookshelf, maybe even pull a couple titles, and see if you can pick out these common threads. I grabbed three books off my shelves: The Long Roll by Mary Johnston, H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian, and Firebird by Kathy Tyers. This is a pretty random selection that contains a little of everything: authors of both genders, two semi-classics, publication dates ranging from 1911 to 1999, and genres as varied as historical and science fiction. But the three things we’re guaranteed to find in common are—you guessed it—relationships, action, and humor.

  Humor

  Let’s begin with humor, since it’s arguably the least important in our triad of essentials. Although I say least, that certainly doesn’t negate its importance. Humor not only possesses the power to entertain the reader and endear him to the characters, it is also essential in balancing the darker elements in serious fictional situations. In “A Letter to a Young Talented Writer,” playwright and short story author William Saroyan advised us to “...remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic, there is always the comic....”26

  Two of my selected books—The Long Roll and Firebird—are dark, wrenching stories. But their moments of lightheartedness bring a powerful contrast. Patrick O’Brian, a master of irony and under-statement, wrote of war and the nature of man, but his incisive wit and nonchalant humor lifted his stories above the sordidness of life and elevated them to philosophical brilliance.

  Action

  Certainly, many stories—lauded classics, even—have been written in which little to no visible action takes place on the page. But, as we’ve already discussed, the best stories, the enduring stories, are always about conflict. And conflict translates into action. Whether it’s the stunning space battles in the work of Orson Scott Card or the subtle machinations and maneuverings of George Eliot’s society set, action constitutes the cogs inside the clockwork of a story. Action moves the story forward, inexorably, across the thematic arc to an inevitable conclusion.

  The Long Roll, the first installment in Mary Johnston’s epic American Civil War duology, is ultimately a biography of the conflict itself, with characters often taking a backseat to the terrifying scope of a national war. In crisp prose, Johnston hypnotizes the reader with the desperate ebb and flow of battle, the surge of individual conflict, and the heat of dreams bleeding away on a churned-up battlefield. More even than in most novels, action is Johnston’s story, and she drives the conflict home with staggering force.

  Relationships

  If stories are a reflection of the human experience, and if the human experience boils down to the interaction between people, we should find relationships at the heart of all fiction. Whether it’s the romantic connection between a man and a woman (Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights), varying familial relationships (Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Adolescent), or the ever-evolving status of friendship (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club), relationships, or occasionally the lamented lack thereof, form the basis of every story.

  In her Firebird trilogy, Kathy Tyers follows the threads of several relationships, including the courtship and marriage of Brennan Caldwell and Firebird Angelo and the strained and even violent relations between Firebird and her estranged family. Through the contrast in these relationships and through the anguish of loss found in powerful personal connections, Tyers is able to weave a story of both deep heartbreak and deeper victory.

  The amount to which each of these three elements is found in any given book will vary, of course. Some books are able to bring humor to the foreground, others push relationships to the
back burner to indulge the action. But, ultimately, these three things are what keep readers turning those pages. These are the elements that inevitably surface in the books that become our personal favorites, and they are elements we must incorporate as we structure our dramatic outlines.

  Strengthen Your Story With Proper Framing

  Framing is a useful, but too often overlooked, technique that gives your story cohesion and directs readers’ loyalties and attention. Frames bookend a story with definitive opening scenes that introduce readers to pertinent characters, settings, and themes, and closing scenes that bring the story to a resonant full circle. Consider some of these examples from popular movies:

  • Peter Pan, directed by P.J. Hogan (2003): This adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play and book offers an especially obvious example of framing, since it was able to use the same opening shot, with a slight variation, as its closing scene. The movie opens with a line of text on the screen (“All children grow up… except one”), which, when repeated by the narrator at the film’s end, not only underlines the theme, but also brings the story to a beautiful full circle.

  • The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich (2000): The movie begins and ends with the South Carolinian farm that symbolizes everything the characters fought and, in some instances, died for during the American War for Independence. It opens with an idyllic look at the peaceful farm life (the character’s “normal world”), which is soon to be destroyed by the imminent war. It ends, after the war, when the surviving characters return to rebuild the farm, which, again, is symbolic of the reconstruction the entire nation was going through.

  • Forever Young, directed by Steve Miner (1992): The framing here is subtler, in that both the beginning and, particularly, the closing scenes are directly inherent to the plot—and the story is all the stronger for it. The opening shot features an early version of the B-25 airplane careening through the skies, while test pilot Daniel McCormick gleefully struggles to keep it under control. The B-25 reappears throughout the movie as a symbol of what the main character loses by sleeping through fifty years of his life, and, in the end, as the key factor in the gambit to reunite the rapidly aging character with his lost love. The movie that opened with the plane plummeting out of the sky closes with a scene of the plane landing in a sunset-backed field.

  • White Christmas, directed by Michael Curtiz (1954): This holiday classic features a beautiful use of framing that incorporates both plot and theme. It opens behind the battle lines in World War II, with the main characters hosting a revue for the men, both in celebration of Christmas and as a farewell to their beloved general. The finale, which takes place several years later, brings the story full circle, ending with another revue on Christmas Eve, in honor of the now-retired general.

  A solid frame grounds your story, neatly foreshadows things to come, and leaves readers with a tidy ending that resonates. Paying attention to framing in the outlining stages will not only save you time in the long run, it will also give you opportunities to grow symbols and recurrent settings and themes organically from your plot.

  The Domino Effect: Make Every Scene Matter

  What is it that makes a novel a novel and not just a collection of short stories? The difference is that a novel is a cohesive whole, in which every scene is so integrally related that to remove one scene would throw the whole story out of whack. Novels are like an elaborate domino pattern—you know the type, the complicated curlicues and whorls that cover hundreds of square feet and require hours upon hours to construct. When every domino is in place, all you have to do is flick that first one, and they all fall in perfect synchronicity. But if even one domino is out of place, the whole pattern screeches to a silent halt.

  Imagine every scene in your novel is a domino in the grand pattern of your story. If the reader is going to be able to topple the pattern and see every domino fall, the author has to design his scenes so each one directly influences those that follow. Every scene has to matter. If you write a scene that fails to influence the scenes that follow—if you could delete it from the story without its making a whit of difference to the plot—then you either need to delete it or come up with a way to make it matter.

  In The Flight of the Falcon, one of Daphne du Maurier’s little-known works, she exhibits her mastery of the domino effect. Every scene in her story, no matter how seemingly innocuous or disconnected from the main plot, has a purpose. She never wastes an opportunity. Walk-on characters, casual dialogue, random bits of description—they all tie into the web she’s weaving around her readers. This is exemplified in a scene late in the book in which the main character, during a ramble on the beach, stops to talk to a nun who is minding several children. Their conversation is the noncommittal, relatively impersonal exchange we would expect from two strangers. A few pages later, the nun leaves the scene, her part in the book complete.

  At first glance, the nun’s scene might appear to be a useless intrusion into the plot, a filler while the main character awaits his appointment, or an attempt by the author to introduce some local color into the description. But as the story enters the climax, we realize du Maurier used this scene to introduce crucial information that caused it to be a turning point for the main character. This simple “filler” became a domino that influenced all the scenes to come. If we can follow her example in mastering this technique, we will streamline our writing so our stories can power ahead at full steam, unimpeded by dead weight.

  Reverse Outlining

  When you think of outlines, you generally think about organization, right? The whole point of outlining, versus the seat-of-the-pants method, is to give the writer a road map, a set of guidelines, a plan. An outline should be simple, streamlined, and linear. An outline should put things in order. So you’re probably going to think I’m crazy when I tell you one of the most effective ways to make certain every scene matters is to outline backwards.

  During the outlining process, we have to create a plausible series of events, a chain reaction that will cause each scene to domino into the one following. But linking scenes isn’t always easy to do, if you don’t know what it’s supposed to be linking to. As any mystery writer can tell you, you can’t set the clues up perfectly until you know whodunit. Often, it’s easier and more productive to start with the last scene in a series and work your way backwards.

  For example, in my outline of a historical story, I knew one of my POV characters was going to be injured so badly he would be unable to communicate with another character for almost a month. However, I didn’t yet know how or why he was injured. I could work my way toward this point in a logical, linear fashion, starting at the last known scene (a dinner party), and building one scene upon another, until I reached my next known point (the injury). But because my chain of events was based on what was already behind me (the dinner party), more than what was away off in the future (the injury), my attempts to bridge the two were less than cohesive.

  Had I outlined these scenes in a linear fashion, squeezing in the injury might have become a gymnastic effort instead of a natural flowing of plot. Plus, the fact that I had no idea what was supposed to happen between the dinner party and the injury meant I was likely to invent random and inconsequential events to fill the space.

  My solution?

  You got it: work backwards.

  Starting at the end of the plot progression—the injury—I began asking questions that would help me discover the plot development immediately preceding. How was the character hurt? Where was he hurt? Why did the bad guys choose to do this to him? Why was he only injured, instead of killed? How is he going to escape? Following is a portion of my backwards outline:

  After Bruce leaves Wendy at the party, I know he’s going to be so seriously injured that he goes incommunicado for a month. Somehow the party has to lead into his injury. What’s the injury going to be? Is he shot, knifed, what? That might depend on the general circumstances. Why is he shot/knifed? Where? Etc.

  Presumably, he’s hurt
as a result of his investigation into Charles’s wrongdoings. Bruce is making enough of a nuisance of himself that Charles wants him out of the way. Is Bruce about to break the case? Maybe he takes his evidence to the higher authorities, and the high authority—partially from apathy and corruption, partly as a result of Charles’s dissembling—fails to do anything. So, as usual, Bruce decides to take matters into his own hands. At the very least, he wants to free Wendy from Charles’s blackmailing. So, as a last ditch effort, he goes to Charles himself and makes demands. Charles would probably just laugh at him at first, and then when Bruce inevitably started throwing his weight around, Charles might give in—only to send his lackeys after Bruce to waylay him.

  So the lackeys get Bruce off someplace alone and mess him up pretty severely. Charles would have no reason to keep him alive, so the question now is how Bruce avoids being killed. Maybe his partner Isaacs has something to do with that?

  What if we had some kind of car chase/crash—just to give us some variation from the shoot-‘em-up scenes to come? So Bruce is driving home from Charles’s house, and the bad guys run him off the road. Why don’t they kill him after they crash his car?

  I suppose Isaacs could show up and shoot them. But that’s pretty messy—not very conducive to a silent disappearance. Maybe Bruce has some kind of spectacular crash, and the bad guys just leave him for dead.

  So how does this help us build scenes up from where I left off? Well, now I know that Bruce gathers enough information to convict—but not hang—Charles. Also, something—some ticking time bomb that climaxes at the dinner party—forces him to confront Charles in order to free Wendy.