October Novel Prep Challenge

Do you mind sharing a little about your story? Your rough premise? It might help with recommendations.

But in the meantime, here are some thoughts about the different styles. Honestly, the best outline strategy for you depends on your own personal work style and sometimes, your project.

Traditional outline:
Good for super organized, OCD type people. Since you're using bullet points, it's best to keep scene descriptions brief, so if you like details right in front of you, this style might not be for you. On the plus side, you can pretty much see everything that happens in your whole novel at a glance.

Note Cards:
Each scene gets its own note card, so you can write more details about each scene. If you're a visual learner who likes to see pictures of things to understand them, this might be a good strategy for you. Cons: it's hard to see everything at once, so you might forget scenes while organizing and have to figure out where to fit them in later.

Snowflake Method:
For the person who prefers narrative/lots of words/stream-of-consciousness type planning to brief descriptions. Starting with your premise, you write more and more details in paragraph form until, in theory, your whole novel is written. It's even harder to see the whole novel at a glance, and difficult to change the order of things.

Various Templates:
For the beginner, these are good choices because they prompt you to remember to include all the story elements. Fewer plot points means more flexibility, but also fewer prompts. More plot points (the Hero's Journey is the largest template) gives you better guidance and might be a good choice for a beginner. You still need to pick one of the methods above because you more than five/eight/twentyish scenes in your book. So, for example, I'm using a hybrid of Traditional and the Five-Point outline:

Exposition:
- Scene 1 description
- Scene 2 description
- Etc.

You could just as easily combine, for example, the Snowflake Method with the Hero's Journey template. You would write a paragraph (or several) describing, with narrative words, what happens during the "Call to Action" plot point (etc.)

Cheers,
Michelle