K.M. Weiland - Outlining Your Novel Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises for Planning Your Best Book

Contents

Learn How to Make Your First Draft Easy!

Award-winning author K.M. Weilands previous book, the bestselling Outlining Your Novel , showed writers how to embrace outlines in a way that makes the writing process fun, inspiring, and easy.

Now its time to put those lessons to use! Building upon the principles youve already learned, the Outlining Your Novel Workbook presents a guided approach to getting the bones of your story down on paper, identifying plot holes, and brainstorming exciting new possibilities.

Containing hundreds of incisive questions and imagination-revving exercises, this valuable resource will show you how to:

• Create your own personalized outlining process
• Brainstorm premise and plot ideas
• Discover your characters
• Choose and create the right setting
• Organize your scenes
• And so much more!

This accessible and streamlined workbook will empower you to create a powerful outlineand an outstanding novel. Start writing your best book today!

Join the discussion: #OutliningYourNovel

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS AN outline? Is it a road map? A battle plan? A checklist?

Its all threeand more. As I discuss in Outlining Your Novel , the outline can be anything you want it to be. You can fill up three notebooks with story plans, or you can scribble a couple thoughts on some Post-It Notes and call it good. How an outline manifests isnt important. The only thing that matters is that your outline helps you figure out this great big puzzle we call a novel.

Why Outlines Make Novel Writing Easier

On the surface, novels seem simple enough. A beginning, a middle, an end. Throw in a couple characters, a heroic quest, an epic romanceand voila! A story is born.

True enough. But if youre one of those people whos tried throwing all those ingredients into a bowl, mixing them up, and letting them bake, you already know the recipe isnt foolproof. In fact, that simple little recipe you thought would make a perfect story? Turns out it barely covers the essential ingredients.

Novels arent like boxed mac and cheese. Boiling water and stirring in Velveeta just isnt enough to produce a masterpiece. Novels are more like pasta parmigianamade from scratch. Sure, theres some magic and some luck involved. But theres also a lot of science.

In short, theres a lot to remember . In all honesty, theres more to remember than most of us can handle while in the white-hot rush of writing a first draft. If we dash in there, throwing about flour and eggs, hoping weve got it all right without bothering to check Nonnas recipe, then were going to need magic and luck.

But if we prepare beforehand, with an outline, well be able to assemble all the ingredients, heat the oven to the right temperature, and approach our dough and sauce with the confidence of foreknowledge.

Stories, for all their seeming simplicity, are complicated. Theyre puzzles, in which all the pieces have to fit just so. Theyre not random dreamscapes that tumble out of our brains, fully formed. Rather, theyre cohesive wholes, in which the beginning and the end must be planned as a partnership. If we dont know how a story is going to end, well never know how to properly begin it. If we dont know the elements that will play into the story, we wont know how to build a framework to support them.

And that is where the outline comes in.

The outline allows us to see the big picture before we have to start fitting together the tiny, detailed pieces. As a result, were able to write our first drafts with confidence and purpose and save ourselves hours of revision.

How to Use This Workbook

When Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success came out in 2011, I was overwhelmed by writers hunger for information on outlining. Most authors recognize the need to bring cohesion to the complicated art form of the novel via some kind of planning. But many are hung up on the old notion that outlines have to be Roman numeraled lists.

Outlining Your Novel presented an actionable approach to planning stories from the ground upcreating a premise, brainstorming plot ideas, interviewing characters, and plotting story arc. The method I shared in the book is the one Ive developed in writing my own historical and speculative novels. But it is endlessly adaptable to the specific needs of each writer.

What you will find in the pages of this workbook is a complete (and, often, expanded) list of every question and every step I describe in Outlining Your Novel . Each chapter offers an introduction to the concepts discussed in the exercises, as well as examples from popular books and movies and my own outlines. I have also included a page-number guide to help you locate the associated chapters in Outlining Your Novel . I recommend you start by reading Outlining Your Novel just as you would a textbookbefore embarking on the workbook. You will understand the principles and their applicability better in context.

Each chapter of the workbook builds upon the next, in a series of steps that will help you move from your storys big picture to the smaller details and back again. The more thorough you are in responding to each question and filling in each blank, the more prepared you will be to write your novel. But dont hesitate to skip around. Some of the sections (such as those on foreshadowing and settings) cant be completed until youve finished all the other steps. Remember: what youre trying to create here is your best process. If you feel constrained by any of the questions or feel they dont apply to your story, go ahead and skip them.

I was determined to offer the workbook as an e-book as well as a paperback, since I knew it would end up being a much more economical option than the hard copy for many readers. However, it is a bit of a different take on a workbook, since you wont be able to write in your answers as you would otherwise. Youll need to grab a notebook and write your answers to the questions and exercises there (which makes the workbook totally reusable!).

Since this is a bit of an experiment, if you purchase the e-book version and decide its not working for you, for whatever reason, please feel free to request a refund. Amazon and most other sellers will provide a full refund if you make your request within seven days of purchase. If youve missed that window, email me and Ill be happy to refund your full purchase price myself. My goal is to make the workbook as accessible and useful as possible. If the e-book format isnt working for you, then its not doing its job!

Throughout the book, youll find graphics illustrating various points. To view the images outside of the constraints of your e-reader, visit my site. You can find all the graphics in this book (and more!) here.

Outlines can transform your writing process into a practicable and focused story-crafting machine. But dont settle for any ol kind of outline. Use the exercises in the following pages to dig deep into the heart of your story and take full advantage of your outlines storytelling power.

CHAPTER 1

PREMISE

BY THE TIME you sit down to outline, your story idea will probably have been chasing around in your head for anywhere from several days to several years. You may not know much about your story yet, but you know enough to start. You probably have ideas for several main characters, a handful of scenes, a general conflict, and maybe a broad sense of the ending.

Your first goal is to hammer all this down into a premise: one or two sentences that convey the characters, the plot, and the theme. Who is your hero? What does he want? Who or what is keeping him from getting what he wants? Whats at stake if he doesnt get it? The premise is where you discover and solidify these decisions.

This is your mission statement for your book. This is where you figure out not just what story you want to write, but what kind of story you want to write. Fast-paced action thriller? Leisurely generational saga? Epic historical romance?