College & Writing Tips - Outline for writing a novel

Hi this is Laura Turner and today we are going to talk about outlining for writing a novel. You can pretty much outline any way that you would like. I'm just going to give you my general idea of what you can do with writing an outline for a novel. A novel is such a big project, that while you are writing it it's going to change over time. So I would suggest that if you do work with an outline, that you keep it open for yourself. I would suggest even sort of mapping out for yourself what needs to happen in the novel, in order for you to tell the story you want to tell. So basically you just have your beginning chunk, and you'll say in the beginning these certain things need to happen. In the middle these things need to happen, and by the end all of this will have happened. Keep that as your go to as your sort of rosetta stone for your novel. So that while you are writing your novel you can go back through, fill in your outline, figure out how the stuff that you've written is going to work into the next part that needs to happen. So how does the beginning of your novel work into your middle, the middle work into the end. So don't put too much pressure on yourself to make a perfect outline that has everything written down because novels are just, they have contained so many small little details that you are going to write as you go along, you almost just can't have an outline that has everything in them. So give yourself deadlines on the outline however, this can also help you to deadline your novel. If you say I want to have the beginning chunk in all the things that happen there, I want to have that done you know by the end of the year. Right. So by the end of the year if you don't have that done, you'll have to look at it and say you know where did I go wrong and what can I do better and how can I utilize my outline to help me get to my deadline. And those were just some tips for outlining your novel.