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Writing a Book Outline
Writing a fiction or a non-fiction book of the highest quality, takes a lot of discipline, hard work, creativity and most importantly, clear thinking! Clear and organized thinking is required in the sense that the writer should have an idea about what he is writing and where it's going to ultimately lead. That is, he needs to write a book outline which is a road map of the book plot.
How to Write a Book Outline?
I assume you are past the initial brainstorming phase about the core idea you intend to present through your book. It may be in the form of a fiction book a.k.a novel or a nonfictional book like a biography, a cookbook, a travelogue or an introduction to some subject. Whatever be your purpose, it is essential that you write a book outline, before starting the actual writing process. It will help in crystallizing your ideas into a more concrete form. Here are some tips.
Fiction writing is experiencing and living an alternative life. If you can actually live through all the story and see it happening vividly in your imagination, it will have substance! The more you can see and feel it, more real it will become. Writing a novel is experiencing everything that happens in it, deeply and go with the flow. Let us see how one can write a book outline for novels.
Write the Story in Brief
When the idea of the story gets a hold of you, start putting it on paper. Write about the happenings of the novel in a short story form. That is to capture the rough outline of the novel in the form of the main developments in a short story. Many great novels have started out as short stories. You can afford to be very brief in this story without going in to the dialogs or more details. It should be a commentary of what will happen chronologically in the novel.
Work on the Possible Twists and Turns
The advantage of writing an outline is that one gets the opportunity of discarding or changing the developments of the storyline, well before going into the explicit details. It can save you a lot of effort which would be wasted, if you would have fleshed that story line and then realized that it's not getting anywhere. At every point in the story, there are many possible alternative developments, out of which you must choose one. If you are writing a mystery novel, then you ought to put-in tantalizing and misleading clues, which you can plant right in the outline. Put in points in the story, which you could expand at a length, later on.
Make Chapters And Link Them
Chalk out parts of the story, which can become individual chapters. Write out chapter headings. It may so happen that one part of the story or chapter is very clear to you and feel like writing it immediately while you are in the flow. Do that! It often happens that you start with one part of the story directly and then write the past and the future linking it into a whole. As one goes on writing, one sends a lot of imaginative shoots in the past and future, creating an imaginative space in your mind. To write a book outline is to bring all these off shots together, and tie all the loose ends. The outline will serve as a guide when you start fleshing up the novel and writing in details. It will give you an idea as to how much you have done, where you are and how much more remains to be done!
Writing a book is like climbing a mountain. So you need to plan your trek to the top and that is what writing an outline is all about. A novel is a fictional journey on which the readers are going to accompany you. To make the journey enjoyable to you and the readers, one must put in a lot of effort!
Mind Mapping
This technique is very effective and a lot of fun. Mind mapping, is graphically mapping your imaginative outbursts on paper. Take a sheet of paper and draw a circle in center and write the central idea of a chapter in it. Then draw smaller connected circles which are the various ideas and developments of the main concept. This way you can have a mind map of your thoughts about the chapter, which will help you in writing every chapter. Then piece together the chapters through a mind map for the whole novel! Try it out!
Learn and take writing tips from the great novelists. See how they order their chapters, polish every small detail. Look at the economy of words and the substance of the story. Read as many classic novels as you can.
No technique of writing an outline for a book is perfect. You will eventually develop your own style of constructing an outline, according to your own writing style. I know writers who never write an outline. They like to keep themselves guessing as to what will happen at the end of a novel. The story sends off shoots in the past and the future. Still try out some of the methods to write a book outline that are suggested here and take up whichever suits you or adapt it according to your style!
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