An endless struggle - Outlining my WIP

Plus a birds eye view of how I write a novel

Its June 1st! Mermay is over and I’m here in your inbox with the outline post I promised!

Outlining has long been a struggle for me. When I was a baby writer, I was a proud pantser - someone who writes with no plan or outline, they write by the seat of their pants. I wore the label like a badge of honour and all those stuffy plotters - writers who didn’t write until they had a meticulously constructed an outline - were stifling their creativity as far as I was concerned. What did I know.

Then, like a fool, I wrote a time travel story - mixing timelines, paradoxes, the whole thing - and suddenly outlining was a necessity. I rewrote my middle grade sci fi Movers a dozen times, my editor and I bending our brains working and reworking the outline until our eyes hurt. We also might have invented time travel in the process? Anyway, it was Movers that taught me the value of a good outline. Now I don’t turn my nose up at plotters, nor do I think pantsers are mislead. I think each story needs what it needs - sometimes that’s pantsing, but a lot of times, its plotting. For most of my books since Movers, my stories have needed at least a minimum effort at creating an outline.

And so it is with my latest WIP (work in progress), a YA fantasy novel with some Wizard of OZ inspiration.

So to share how I outline, I thought I should first break down how I write in general so you can see where the outline comes into things for me. A birds eye view of the whole story process. Now, this is a rough outline, it changes all the time. But in general: