The Importance Of Outlining your Novel ; From A Writers Ranting Perspective

Before I began writing I used to think it was the easiest thing just right what you want and freestyle it but in truth, I realized that there is something more to this. Every writer has their own way of doing things, their own way of writing and expressing their ideas but there is something that all writers have in common. They believe that every story should always have a middle beginning and an ending, sometimes not necessarily in that order and not in the way they mean.

When I talk about the beginning of a story and an end I don’t mean the actual beginning but the place with the most impact where you want to start the book. It could be by starting with the end of the story and working your way back to the beginning or you could start in the middle when everything is at its peak and deconstruct everything at that time. So when I say Beginning Middle and End I don’t necessarily mean the floor of it rather I mean what it means to you as a writer.

Sometimes A writer can have a specific place they want to go in their writing. They know that this character will do this, become that, marry him, lose that, and get injured here. If you are a writer that can get a whole map of a story in their head in an instant then I congratulated you, but I also know that you have the story of the main character outlined and not the others.

One thing I know is that in every good story every character matters even if you write about a crow flying away from fright as a car explodes, you’re simply explaining the surrounding and how the car explosion impacted the things around it so in a way you are creating a visual in a readers head.

Nearly every Writer knows their story and sometimes on the rare occasion actually sits down and plans out their stories in detail. In the beginning, I never placed myself in that category. Not because I was really good at it but I just thought that all you needed was a good imagination. I quickly found out how wrong that could be. I have plotted down everything except for the most important things and that is the threads that link the story.

Every story, every subplot, and every character has to have meaning, they have to have life in them, or else it would just be another story that had a beginning, middle, and end and is not memorable in the slightest.

Now for the ranting. I never really noticed how frustrating plotting can actually be. It takes a lot of brainpower to puzzle together what you want this character to do and what you’ll do with the other one.

I remember I posted an article a while back stating how I had been given a story outline to write by my editor. I remember hating every second of it. It didn’t match my values and there were so many loose ends that I had to explain in a way that doesn’t impact the story negatively. Recently I’ve fallen in love with writing down the plot of my novel on a software board and let me tell you it is fantastic.

It stirs me in the right direction constantly. I have pictures of how I envisioned my characters, There are places and images from Pinterest that I place there to give me an all-round vibe of what I want it to be. I have tapes around them linking things and plot points together which is constantly changing in ways that I didn’t even imagine possible, Last week I got to kill a character off simply because it would have made the most impact.

I’m a sucker for a good love triangle but I also like enemies to lovers so I decided to put both in one which is safe to say was a good thing. Back to the point. I feel like in order to truly understand the story you want to tell you to need to look into every single aspect of it all and see if there’s something for you.