K. M. Weiland, Outlining Your Novel (PenForASwordPublishing 2011)
This manual reviews KM Weiland’s tips on writing Outlines for your novel. Each chapter also includes choice advice from several excellent and best-selling authors on the subject.
Contrary to popular preconceptions, writing an outline does not stifle creativity, it stimulates it, while crucially lending it structure. As you move from Conceiving to Outlining to Writing to Revising, you are moving backwards and forwards between your right and left brain, the analysis of the one and the passion of the other feeding into each other.
If you spend three entire months on your Outline, don’t sweat it, it might save you a year on the Revision.
Weiland goes through the main questions you should ask yourself as you go about composing your Outline. Most of them are ones you would assume, but it never hurts to read a book about it. Asking these questions from the very beginning not only saves you time on the Writing and Editing, it also provides direction. You can explore possible beats and directions before you commit hours to writing them (and get stuck with a bunch of ‘darlings’ which are painful to ‘kill’).
If you’ve already asked yourself the pertinent questions, your writing can flow from that by simply ‘connecting the dots’. Your writing will be more confident and your story will have better structure.
In the second stage, when you write your Extended Outline, you can brainstorm different ways to accomplish the main criteria you set out for yourself. E.g. She needs to be rescued by someone. Who would be the most interesting character to do that? What are 10 possible things that could happen? What are 5 possible outcomes from this situation she’s in?
My biggest take-aways from this book is that Outlining my novel can help me pinpoint where I need to up the stakes to ramp up the conflict and where I need to connect her external struggle to her internal struggle. And that to keep readers engaged, scene endings/chapter endings should have an inherent question: Will she win the fight? What’s in that letter she just opened?
Susie Helme 
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