I honestly can't stop now... I just want to keep developing ideas within the story and maybe the chapters will just coalesce from the ramblings. I've got a general story outline, outlines for all 4 acts, and outlines for each chapter. I've got outlines of the arcs for the main characters and I'm working on outlining the magic system now. I don't think I'm missing anything after that - god forbid, I might have to actually start work on the draft.
Outlining can be fun if you approach it with enthusiasm. I always say, don't think of it as a blueprint but as a fire escape plan. It's not a list of what you must do (a blueprint), but a path you plan to follow (an escape). When you find a hallway full of flames, take a better route. In fact, you're glad it was burning because you crave drama. Parkour through the destruction. Raid the candy machine and save the sexy secretary. Duel your boss at the exit. He set the fire for insurance reasons. I've lost track of my metaphor . . . Just be flexible with your outline. It guides you. It doesn't command you. You use it to guarantee a minimum competency, a story that should be fun (or tearful, horrific, informative, profound, or whatever your genre demands). You're always willing to take a new route if it gives more of what you need. You don't just want to get out of the story alive, you want to escape enthralled.
Absolutely this. I need a plan to start moving, but once moving, plans can change. Outlines that feel like they work great don't always hold up once you start colouring them in, but that's fine. Edit and adjust course.
You don't want to outline every aspect of it, be sure to leave some room for the actual writing, so you still need to make some decisions at that stage, or you might lose interest. I've seen a lot of people say this happened because they felt like they had already done all the creative parts and there was no fun left for the actual writing. I guess it's a matter of finding that balance point so you're not over-outlining.
Excellent point! I've probably gone further into outlining now than I will in the future, I've enjoyed it but it's time to start putting it to use and making progress in the draft now.
That's actually a pretty good way to approach things—overcompensate one way, then the other, and then find that nice middle ground, so you understand the limits on both sides from experience.
I find 3x5 cards, physical or digital, a better approach for me. They amount to a scene name, and a couple of sentences of what needs to happen in the scene. Like story boarding for a movie, this makes things easy to change the order of things as new approaches come to mind. Like everything else with writing, we need to find the approach that works for us individually.
I've made a list of chapters in each act very similar to that, then I've taken a deeper dive into each chapter separately and added some more details.
I absolutely agree with everyone's advice about staying flexible to a degree, but I know from experience that you can veer off coarse far enough to get lost. If you're part pantser, it's probably not a problem. If you work best from an outline, and you've accidentally scrapped said outline somewhere along the way, it can be very difficult to get back on track. You might find yourself suddenly stuck with no roadmap for your third act. You have options at that point, of course. You can backtrack thousands of words (I talked myself into losing 35K once, and it hurt. Thankfully, I figured out what I'm going to do with it later.) or you can write an all new outline to cover the remainder of the book, which sounds easy enough, but for some reason ain't. I can only speak on my own experience, but for some reason, I've found outlining an ending to a partially finished story far more challenging than writing an original outline from beginning to end. What lesson have I learned from at least twice throwing away my map and getting hopelessly lost? I've learned that personally, I need to stick to my story while leaving room to make discoveries along the way. Scenes don't always end up as envisioned, and characters react differently than I originally thought they would, which is great, but I try to stay within sight of the path. I stick to my plot points, in other words, and I aim for the ending I already had in mind. It's not the only way to write a book, but it's working for me so far.
I already found the need for being flexible with the outline by the fact I've combined 2 scenes in the opening chapter into 1. The feedback in this thread has been excellent and very helpful, cheers!
