Learning to Outline

I've stressed the importance of outlining before, and talked about my own issues with formal outlines, primarily that they can be just as daunting as sitting down in front of a blank page (or a blank screen) and writing untethered.

I learned how to outline in grade school the proper way with headings and roman numerals with the goal of writing "power paragraphs." By the time I got to high school, I threw that all away, and by college I was writing everything like it was a blog post. Not smart.

There's no way around it. For a longer piece of writing, a good outline is the best tool you have in your arsenal to make your writing smooth and coherent. It doesn't have to be a formal one, just a list with chapter breakdowns and some expectation of what's supposed to "happen." A little trick I like for when your just starting a long piece of fiction is to pick a novel or longer short story you like, and are familiar with, and write an outline of that. It can help you see how a particular piece of fiction is structured when planning your own story.