Writing a Book Outline

Writing a fiction or a non-fiction book of the highest quality, takes a lot of discipline, hard work and creativity. 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 plot.

Your book may be in the form of a fiction 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 an outline, before starting the actual writing process. It will help in crystallizing your ideas into a more concrete form.

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 going with the flow.

When the idea of the story gets hold of you, start putting it on a paper. Write a rough outline about the happenings, in a short story form. Many great novels have started out as short stories. You can be very brief in this story, without going into the dialogues or details. It should be a commentary of what will happen chronologically, in the novel.

The advantage of writing an outline is that one gets the opportunity of discarding or changing the developments of the story line, 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.

To write a book outline is to bring all these offshoots together, and tie all the loose ends. It will serve as a guide, when you start fleshing up the novel and writing in the details. It will give you an idea about how much you have done, where you are, and how much more remains to be done.

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 the 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 it. Then, piece together the chapters through a mind map for the whole novel.

No technique of writing an outline or a novel is perfect. You will eventually develop your own style of constructing one. There are writers who never write one. They like to keep themselves guessing, as to what will happen at the end of a novel. The story sends offshoots into the past and the future. Still, use the method that suits you best. All the best!