How to Outline a Novel in Scrivener

one of scripters most powerful features is the ability to outline your book however you want but many people struggle to stay organized the program is so flexible that it can be daunting for a beginner to create structure for themselves in this video I'm going to show you how to outline your novel using Scrivener in several of the major outlining methods I'll also show you some examples from my own novels so you can take what works for you and apply it with your writing what's up guys this is michael around with off the level up giving you the best tools and strategies for writing faster and reaching readers with your stories there are so many different outlining methods out there in this video I will assume that you have basic knowledge of the major ones if you want a quick overview of the most commonly accepted outline methods check out my video on outlining link is in the video description and let's set a few ground rules first everyone has to find their own way do what works best for you even if that means pantsing I've seen some Scrivener projects that are completely decked out color-coded you know lots of images and other bells and whistles and some writers that's that's their style if that's you fine but just remember that there are other ways to do it as well nothing more nothing less your time is almost always spent better writing and it's better to have an imperfect outline in an amazing story written than to have a beautiful outline and no story at all so let's jump into Scribner alright so we're here in Scrivener and we are inside my Android X series I wrote this series back in 2015 and it's one of my better selling series when I wrote it I was learning to outline so I was experimenting with a bunch of different methods and I actually used a lot of the major outlining methods for this series now it's not something I'd recommend that you do but for the sake of this video and teaching you how I outlined and scribner it actually comes in pretty handy because I can show you real examples of these methods at work and these are examples that I actually used in real production not examples that I made up so let's talk about what I did before I even started outlining because I think that is pretty important so all of my stories start with a what-if question so I take that I expand it and I just have a free writing session and I just I keep writing for you know about 5 10 minutes until I have something interesting so in this case I started with a simple question what if a novel took place in the year 2300 what would life be like what if robotics and androids are real and I just kept writing I no barriers no no critical voice no thinking through any of this just hands to the keyboard typing like a madman for five to ten minutes just to see where I end up and it took me about five minutes to do this and when I was done I actually had the bones of what will become Android paradox which is book 1 in the Android X series and it's actually pretty amazing that very little that I wrote here actually changed most of this ended up being incorporated into the novel in some fashion so that's certainly one way to start before you outline to make sure that your outline gets off on the right foot it's just starting with a what-if question and expanding on that down just make sure you don't spend too much time you know doing your free writing but the next thing that I did with this series before I started outlining was my character work character work is pretty important because it's what you want to start with because you want you want to know where your character is going to go what kind of journey you're gonna take them on as well as what kind of journey you're gonna take the reader on and so I started with my main character X and I start with like a simple description of what he is so an Android special agent struggles to learn the truth about his origins and I did the GMC goal motivation conflict and then I just did another free writing session about who I thought that X would be and so this is a little bit longer it's about 1500 words explored this quite a bit and you can do this and I did this with all of my main characters in the series so I've got an Android special agent he struggles to learn the truth about his origins did some free writing on him I've got shortcut his sidekick who's an up-and-coming Android programmer who desires to prove himself and then Jazlyn and Android bounty hunter living between humans and androids and I did the same thing for her and then I did the same thing for my villain I write sketches about their history their background anything that I think is important in their past I could potentially use in the novel when I'm outlining all that stuff is important but the key when you're doing character work if you choose to do this is never hold yourself to any of your pre-production work and don't feel like you're married to everything that you write I think so many people see this and think that they just have to write everything that they've written in their outline or in their pre-production materials to the letter and that's not true it's it's just it's just nothing but trouble just remember an outline is simply a tool to help you stay organized it when you're doing this stuff just remember to let your creative voice out to play anything is possible and it can totally change later so once I've done a concept and once I've done so my character work that you're ready to jump into the outlining and remember there's no one way to outline but how I started with this series was I started with a history of the world so what you can't see is that I did a lot of research into Android robotics and Android science and although all the predictions and things that people think will happen in the future with robotics and a lot of books listen to a lot of shows watch a lot of videos talk to some people that I knew and so what I thought would be helpful was to create a history of the world since the novel takes place in the year 2300 so I started off in the present day in 2020 and I just kind of made some predictions you know took some liberties of where I thought that the world was gonna go and you know goes into 2100 which I had to put my thinking cap on for that and then there's a singularity in $21.99 that's pretty important throughout the series when basically injuries almost destroy the world and then there's you know what happens after the singularity and all the way down to the you know the father of father of androids being born all the way down to the main character being born all the way down to 2300 which is the present day so I find this immensely helpful for science fiction and fantasy if you're writing a thriller in the modern world probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense but a time line is something that certainly can't help you now another way that you could do this is by using beats now if you know the guys at Sterling in stone or self-publishing podcast or currently known as the story studio podcast they use this for their further outlining so beats is basically your story and narrative form so that you have a story like indicator of where the story is going to go as you're writing it so some people find this very effective and basically you know you're you're writing a couple thousand words per chapter summaries of where the story is gonna go so I did this with Android paradox and X I did it with all three books in the series and as you can see here I've got more than a few paragraphs but basically gets wrote out where I thought the story would go and for the most part chapter 1 I think was fairly accurate the only thing with beats is I think that they're effective I think that they they certainly can help you but just remember don't let beats dictate everything and by the way before we continue I just want to let you guys know that what you see here in this outline it's not even accurate not by a long shot I deviated from this outline like crazy that's why I don't have any issues showing it to you I say that because some writers might see this and think that they have to write beats and hold themselves to that and you don't have to do that alright another method that you can use to outline your story is the plot point method so probably many of you are familiar with this I think that the plot point method is the easiest method to understand if you're just starting off because you can you can easily see it in movies and you can learn from it in movies and so anytime you go to the movie theater or turn on Netflix you're basically doing research which i think is helpful when you're just starting off it gives you some good confidence and it also gives you a good structure to follow now the three-act method you've probably heard of that as well that's that's pretty easy to understand too so what I did here was I combined them together I find that they go together very well so I took the plot points broke those into acts and then then I use that to help guide me throughout the rest of the novel now if you've never heard of the plot point method or the three-act method refer to my video how to outline a novel and that will give you everything that you need to know and you watch that and then you come back here and then hopefully that's what you see here we'll make a little bit more sense to you so out of all the things I did to outline the novel I would say that this was the most accurate I'm I've got my inciting incident my plot my pinch points my mirror moment you know all the things that you would expect to see in a story that follows the plot point theory now what I like about the plot point theory is that it gives you some structure what I like about the three-act method is that it gives you a good sense of a beginning middle and end but it doesn't always give you structure and so that's why I think the two of them go together pretty well so that's a method that you can use as well and the next method I'm going to talk about is the snowflake method now I use the snowflake method I kind of used it for Android paradox and basically what you do is you start with a one sentence summary of the novel and then you expand on that so an Android special agent finds himself in the middle of a political conspiracy while trying to become human not a description if Android paradox at all but you should get a start somewhere right and so you expand that and so I expanded it and eventually ended up into a version that I was happy with but again a lot of this stuff changed and then I did some character analysis and as you can see I definitely deviated from the snowflake method quite a bit but that's okay if you're using the snowflake method I think the key here and I think the important thing that I did here was I was just starting to think about the marketing you know when you when you start with a one sentence summary this summary that you have very well if you do your job very well could end up in the book description yeah that's your first line so just something to think about all right so let's say you're done outlining and you're ready to start the novel your Scribner offers some tools that can help you when you're outlining and they'll help you stay organized so I'm inside the manuscript now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to the corkboard and as you can see here this is the threaded cork board so I have I'll change this here so as you can see this is the cork board and I've got a synopsis for each chapter and as you can see they're all organized and color-coded so red is my main character X blue is my sidekick shortcut and green is Jazlyn who comes in later in the book and if I click on this here on the bottom I can get into threaded cork board mode and I can click on this to change it and this basically just gives me a visual representation of what's in the book you might find that helpful now if I go to outline mode up here you'll see the novel in a list format and you can see the labels here you can certainly use the status if you want but what I've done here that I thought was helpful that I'll tell you guys is you may see that I added an extra category so this is custom metadata so custom metadata allows you to tell Scribner what is inside each of your chapters so for example I have all mine broken out by locations so what I'll do here is if you click that little gear this takes you to location and you can create that and so what you can do you double click you can talk about you could describe where the novel takes place this is a good tool that certainly can help you stay organized and so later on when you're editing what you can do is you can filter by locations and you can pull up all of the different chapters that appear in a certain location if you needed to edit it later so that's really how you outline a novel it's it's not so much there's no secret in Scrivener in terms of okay well you need to do this use this tool or use that tool essentially it boils down to whether you prefer the corkboard outline mode or both but I think the key is is how you set your outline up and what you choose to do in your documents outside of your manuscript in Scrivener so I went through a few of the major methods here certainly yours is gonna look different than mine but I always think it's helpful to see how other people use programs and maybe this will give you some ideas that you can take away and use in your own workflow I hope this video showed you some tips that you can use to outline your next novel in Scrivener I'm interested in hearing from you guys how do you outline your books in Scrivener let me know in the comments don't forget to watch the rest of the videos of my Scribner essentials series links are in the comments and if this is your first time watching I'd love to have you subscribe every week I publish videos just like this one with writing and marketing advice to help you write better and grow your influence with readers thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Author Level Up

Views: 42,942

Keywords: author level up, outlining a novel, outlining a novel in scrivener, how to outline a novel with scrivener, scrivener for outlining, scrivener for beginners, scrivener tips, scrivener tips and tricks, best writing app for writers, best writing apps for authors, best apps for novelists, writing a novel with scrivener, how to write a novel with scrivener, scrivener walkthrough, scrivener demo, scrivener help, learn scrivener, scrivener how to

Id: usEnROe2LTQ

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 23 2018