Over-Outlining

For the longest time, I was averse to any serious outlining. It seemed like a lot of unnecessary work, equivalent to actually writing the book or doing the report or whatever. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, but I lay most of the blame with my early English teachers. What I was taught consisted of an indecipherable chart of branching circles and squares. There was supposedly some logic to the jumble of ideas that my snot-nosed peers seemed to have little trouble grasping, but to me it just looked like the mad organizings of an accountant. When I got serious about writing novels, I immediately realized I had to find a more tolerable way to accomplish this early-stage grunt work, and out of desperation I came up with a system that I think simplifies, and perhaps demystifies, the whole process.

Instead of bubbles and squares, I open a blank Excel file, and in one or two sentences, I type any chapter ideas I already have into separate cells in the first column. This way I get a visual of the structure of the book and can easily rearrange chapters. I find that once I have a few figured out, the rest start filling themselves in, either from inspiration or narrative necessity. When I'm done, I have a couple sentences detailing every plot element that needs to be in each chapter of the first "part" (third, quarter, or however I'm structuring it). I list character details and stray ideas below, but I leave most of the subsequent parts blank to begin with so that the story has room to roam. This gives me some direction but leaves me free to explore the details as I go.

It's just one particular way of doing things, which happens to work for me. I think it's a quick and easy way to get started and stay organized, but the point is that you should do things in the way that is going to make it easiest for you to get from the first word to the last, whatever that may be.