Author: 314 (Yang Chen)
Previously, I discussed how to write outlines in my last article, "How to design your settings and write your overall outline." Please reference that article as well. However, since many authors still seem to have questions, allow me to provide some extra pointers here.
There are two main types of overall outlines. One type is for other people to look at, and the other type is one that you write for yourself.
The first type is an outline used when your editor checks your story. Or, it's what you show to an interested publisher, judges in a writing contest you enter, anime, movie, or game producers that are interested in working with your story, and so on.
Typically, what they request to see is called your story "outline." But actually, its true foundational nature isn't a true outline at all. This type of outline can also be called a story synopsis, summary, and so on.
Writing something like this is actually a simplified method of writing. You're writing such an outline based on others' needs, including what they want to see about the content, word count, important points, and so on. You're satisfying the needs of whoever the person reading this outline is. For example, if your editor wants to see your outline for your story, you should be relatively concise with your words. You need to let your editor understand the overall plot of your story, what cheats are in the story, major story developments, and so on.
A true outline is the one I mentioned that you write for yourself. An outline's purpose is to help yourself, the author. This is its most basic function, which is often forgotten.
Many authors have asked me if the outline is absolutely necessary or not, or if they can skip writing an outline, and so on. These authors evidently don't realize this most basic function of the outline. Obviously, you as the author have full power to decide whether you wish to write an outline or not. Nobody can possibly force you. It's not like there's a teacher that's giving you a homework assignment. So, whether or not you do the outline, and how much of an outline you write, all depends completely on you, the proverbial student. It's all up to the author's own will.
Now then, why should we write an overall outline?
First is to control the tempo of your story. This is because during the long, long process of writing an equally long webnovel, it's typically impossible to keep the author's time taken to write the story, the time passing in the story, and how much time the readers spend reading your story all equal. For example, to use simple algebra as a representation, maybe the author spent x amount of time writing the story, 10x amount of time passed in the story, while the readers only spent 0.5x amount of time reading the story.
So, if you don't have an overall outline helping you to keep your tempo steady, and you just write whatever comes into your mind, it's quite easy for the tempo to become unbalanced. Your story will seem either too slow or too quick to the readers. Either way, it will be a poor experience for the readers.
Apart from controlling your tempo, an overall outline can also help the author set other limitations on their own novel, such as controlling how plots develop.
For example, let's say the plot of your story has the main character going out on a shopping trip because his mother asked him to buy some groceries. However, if you don't put any limits on yourself, and just write whatever comes into your mind, maybe the main character will save a little child on his way to the grocery store, and then he meets the kid's older sister, who just happened to be under unwanted romantic advances by a hooligan. And when your main character is done defeating the hooligan, a white-bearded immortal just happened to pass by and take your main character in as a disciple… Once the main character finished cultivating, one hundred years have already passed by…
So, what ever happened to the groceries that the main character's mom wanted?
Apart from preventing ourselves from going wild, outlines can also give us plenty of hints.
On one hand, during the long process of writing, we can keep adding all our various flashes of inspiration into our outline. As you write your plot, you can naturally recall these flashes of inspiration. If you don't write your flashes of inspiration down, it's quite likely that you'll end up forgetting about them several days later. Or, even if you do recall them, it's probably long past the point in the plot where your flash of inspiration is suitable to be added in your story.
Not only that, the outline can constantly guide us in what direction we should take our overall plot in. To continue using that grocery shopping example, let's say that I'm the story's author, and I developed writer's block as I kept writing. I became confused and didn't know what to write anymore. In that case, if I take a look at my outline, I'd suddenly realize that I should have the main character finally finish his grocery shopping.
This will reduce the chance that you develop writer's block.
All of the above is how an outline can help you when writing. No matter what, you need to understand that writing an outline is in order to help yourself and make things easier on you. An outline will help smooth out the process of writing your story and make it even better. If your outline somehow has the opposite effect, then obviously, you didn't write your outline correctly. In that case, you might as well not write at all.
Now then, what exactly does a correct outline look like?
Actually, outlines come in all sorts of shapes and forms. Let me give a few examples.
"My main character will level up once per 10,000 words for the first 100,000 words. She'll then level up once per 50,000 words for the next 900,000 words. After that, she'll level up once per 100,000 words until I reach the end of my novel."
This outline consists of a total of only 44 words. Does this count as an outline?
Without a doubt, this is an outline. It can even count as a complete overall outline for your entire novel. That's right, this is a complete outline. That's because this outline targets your entire novel, not just a specific portion.
Here's another example.
"The next time my main character levels up, he's going to experience a heaven-sent calamity. His weapon is also going to level up together with him."
Does this count as an outline as well?
Yes, this is also an outline. Of course, this isn't a complete outline, but only a partial one.
Still, I never said that outlines needed to be incredibly detailed or complete. Anything that can help us during the process of creation, no matter how long or short the outline seems, counts as an outline.
That's why there's no such thing as a universal outline. Whatever outline you need is the one that's best for you.
If you're not good at controlling the tempo of your story, that means your outline should have more limitations on your own plots from spiraling out of control. You need to be extra strict with yourself in controlling the word count between each time your character levels up or reaches the climax of a plotline. If you're the type who writes too many subplots at once, and often forget about your own story's important characters and items, then just write all of them into your outline and use them in your story whenever you remember to. And if you're the type who's born with excellent talent in this field and have no problems with controlling the tempo of your story at all, then congratulations, there's no need for you to write an outline at all… Everyone is different.
Of course, for the average author, I would recommend you to write an outline. At the very least, you should try it out and see if the outline helps you or not. If you're absolutely certain that an outline will make things worse for you, then I suppose you can abandon your outline at that time.
The most traditional method to write an outline is to outline your main character leveling up, together with the major events of your story. Or, you should begin fleshing out your blueprint for your story by adding more details.
For instance, to continue using the first example of an outline I gave above which had the main character leveling up once every xxx amount of words, we can now start adding more details to the outline. You could begin by adding various locations to your story and planning out your story's important events. You can set word limits for many important story events, such as how many words before your story changes locations, meets a new danger, begins a new subplot, and so on. Then, we can use your novel's genre to consider more specific scenarios. We can think about whether your main character should start with learning from a teacher, or perhaps being exiled from her family. Should she receive a special cheat ability at the very beginning? Or, maybe the story will start with her fiancé breaking off his engagement to her. Should she gradually level up and become more powerful, or will she do something major right from the very start?
All these storyline scenarios might come into conflict with the leveling up outline presented earlier. In that case, we should put everything together and adjust things appropriately. We said that we wanted the main character to level up once per 10,000 words at the beginning, but maybe the main character in the story is currently undergoing training, and you plan to give a few level-ups once her training is complete, which will take 20,000 to 30,000 words.
In that case, there's a conflict between your plot and your outline, but that's fine. We can just slightly adjust the leveling pace of our story to make it so that she levels up a few times every 30,000 words instead.
However, if the training arc of your storyline is going to take 200,000 to 300,000 words instead, this is obviously going to be a problem. Either you should shorten your plot, change your story, or change your original plan of giving your main character numerous level-ups at once at the end of the training arc, and have her level up a few times in the middle.
This is how we can constantly adjust any conflicts between our storyline and our outline. Once you can excellently combine them together, that means you have a pretty good outline.
Now then, once you have a good outline, do you really need to follow everything it says? What if you go off track?
These are two different questions. For the first question, my opinion is that the answer is yes. Since you went to the trouble of making this outline, of course you should follow it. You don't need to follow it strictly to the letter, but your story should at least be within your outline's framework. Otherwise, there wouldn't even need to be an outline in the first place.
Still, writing isn't anything mechanical where there's only one correct answer. Writing is a creative process filled with our imagination. It's quite common to write a little extra, a little less, or to think of something new in the middle of your storyline. If you follow your outline strictly to the letter, not only will this make you feel awkward, it will also placing restraints on your own creativity.
So, outlines need to be followed, but you don't need to follow them completely. It's not a problem to slightly go off track within limits.
But what if you go completely off track? What if you originally intended this one arc to take up only 30,000 words, but it ended up taking 130,000 words instead, or even 300,000? Or, what if you originally planned to have this important character have an important plot focused around them, but you ended up killing them off instead?
The answer is – you must change. Still, whether you should change your storyline or your outline depends on the situation.
The process of writing contains no absolutely correct answers. There's no such thing as a writing style that's the best or perfect. That's why the outline you came up with at the very beginning might not even be the best choice. So, getting sidetracked from your outline isn't always a bad thing.
If you notice that you have gotten sidetracked from your outline, you should stop and analyze your own story to determine if getting sidetracked is a good or bad thing for you.
In the example where you wrote 300,000 words for the story arc that you only intended to write 30,000 words about, this situation will typically break the storyline's flow for your readers and is almost always a bad thing. If you determine that this is bad for your story, you need to start fixing your own storyline. Either you need to delete words until your 300,000 words become 30,000, or you need to make major changes and add leveling up and climaxes to the middle of your arc in order to not make the story feel too slow for your readers.
As for the example of where you killed off a character and now regret doing so because you wanted to use that character again later, this is quite a difficult situation to analyze. We need to weigh the pros and cons and see which wins out in the end. For instance, if your novel is a suspense type novel, it might even be a good thing to kill off one of the main characters that all your readers believed would survive to the end, as this will increase the overall feeling of suspense and tension in your novel. In that case, you can keep your storyline, and change the later plot you wanted to use and have it revolve around a different character instead. Or, you'll have to write a scenario where this character suddenly comes back to life or was only faking their death.
However, what if there's some authors that don't have enough analyzation ability to know if it's a good thing or bad thing to sidetrack from their outline?
It's very simple. If you can't even decide, then treat it as a bad thing. If you don't have sufficient ability, the best writing method is to strictly follow your outline and immediately change anything you discover that goes off track.
Finally, allow me to give a simple summary.
1. Outlines aren't absolutely necessary, but I recommend that all authors should definitely try writing one.
2. Writing an outline is purely for your own convenience as an author, so you should write an outline in whatever format you desire or prefer. There's no limitations on how to write your outline at all.
3. If you really have no idea how to write an outline, you can try the method of setting word count limits for entering each new location, each plot twist, each climax, level up, and so on. Give yourself clear word count goals for each part of your story before filling it in with details.
4. If you notice that you've gotten off track from your overall outline and need to decide if it's a good or bad thing, make a decision whether you should change your outline or your storyline. If you don't know which you should change, then always change your storyline first.