Outline Your Novel In 1 Hour

Structure and plan and set up your book for success…in just 60 minutes

For some, outlining their (hopefully)-soon-to-be novel is a huge joy and excitement, something to obsess and work on for days and weeks and even months, carefully and perfectly crafting every single bit of the characters, world, plot, and countless subplots that’ll pepper every page.

And for some, outlining is a hassle that they would rather just ignore completely.

However, outlining and planning your novel before you write it is extremely helpful, and will increase your chances of actually finishing your story, along with improving the quality of your book — outlining also helps with writing short stories.

So, to get the best of both worlds — a solid plan without spending dozens of painful days — here’s how to outline your novel in a single hour.

Premise(5 Minutes)

The premise is your idea for your novel, the whole overarching concept. You should already have a pretty good idea of what the premise is, but if you don’t yet know what your story’s going to be about, for quick ideas use writing prompts.

Write down three or four sentences describing your premise. Keep in mind this should have elements of characters(who), setting(where/when), and plot(what/why). This premise will the main skeleton and backbone of your whole novel — but remember that it’s subject to change, especially once you get to further defining your plot.

Once you’re done with this quick step, you should have something like this in your outline:

‘Daina’s family has been ripped apart by the war with the monsters, and the only person she has left is her younger brother — Rame, half-insane from the trauma he’s went through. Daina must fight for her survival, manipulating people who trust her and taking whatever she can for herself, and for her brother. But when Rame is kidnapped, Daina must make a decision long awaited — save her brother, or save herself?’

Characters(20 Minutes)

Characters are the driving force of any good story, and for that reason they come before plot. Of course, you already know the main events of who and what’s going to happen in your story due to the premise, but here is where you sketch out your main characters.

When creating your characters, keep in mind to only do the important characters, as this is a one hour outline. You can add more character profiles as you start to write.

A good tip is to only create character profiles about the people who are mentioned by name in your premise. In the above example, the character profiles would be of Daina and her younger brother Rame.

When creating character profiles, these are the main things you want to sketch out:

Name:

Physical Description/Gender:

Strengths(positive character traits):

Flaws(negative character traits):

Relationships(family and relevant friends):

Backstory(anything important that happened in your character’s life that doesn’t actively take place in the novel and affects them(and the plot) today):

In the end, you should have two to five character profiles. The more characters you create profiles for, the less time you’ll be able to spend on each one, so only create character profiles on the most important, important, important characters.

World(10 Minutes)

After you’ve gotten a good sense on who your characters are, now it’s time to work on where your characters are.

Obviously, the amount of time, work, and detail you need to put into this section varies greatly depending on what type of world your story is in.

If your novel is a contemporary one set in our present-day world, you’ll probably spend much less time on worldbuilding than if your story takes place in an epic space war filled with alien races, strange planets, and intergalactic government affairs.

When writing large fantasy and science fiction worlds, you might want to spend a lot more time on worldbuilding — even go past the one hour outline, just because world and lore is such a big part of your story, so you need to plan and work accordingly.

However, if you want just a basic overview of your world, here’s a quick template of a world profile:

Name(usually Earth):

Broad Location(ex. New York, Bei Jing, Paris, small Kansas town; state/city/area/region where most of the story takes place):

Important Settings(locations where your characters will mostly be; also with short, one sentence descriptions of these settings):

Rules/Laws(that vary from Earth’s; usually in fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopian):

History(what happened, or is happening, that heavily affects the current world)

Government(if it varies from reality’s):

Plot(25 Minutes)

Building character and world is fun — but one of the most rewarding and exciting part of outlining your story is actually deciding what happens. In other words, developing the plot.

My preferred method of plot building is creating a bullet or numbered list, listing all the things that happen in chronological order. You’re creating plot points, moments in your story that further move the plot.

Depending on how detailed you want to get, you can use varying amounts of plot points. Sometimes, a part of your story may have two loose plot points along the lines of ‘Danny falls in love’ and ‘Danny proposes’.

Sometimes, another part of your story may have twenty plot points filled with vivid imagery and even lines of dialogue, because you’re either excited to flesh them out or have already imagined and developed them.

Other things you can include in your plot building is perspective. If you’re story has multiple characters that tell the story, either first-person or third-person, you might want to loosely decide who will tell the different parts. These ‘parts’ don’t have to be just individual plot points, they can be multiple plot points told by the same character.

When you’re done with this step, you should have a bullet or numbered list of the things that happen in your story. Here’s an extremely loose example following the previously mentioned story with only a few plot points — yours should hopefully have much more detail.

• (Daina’s perspective) Daina and her family are attacked by monsters; parents die
• Daina and Rame flee to abandoned building where they build shelter
• Daina steals things and is caught
• Daina must kill captor and is horrified
• Daina begins to steal and kill more and more, losing innocence
• Rame’s mental and physical condition grows worse
• Daina seeks help from hospital
• Hospital turns out to be run by monsters
• Daina escapes after a long fight
• When she returns Rame is gone
• Daina goes on journey to save Rame
• In the end, Daina sacrifices herself to save her brother
• (Rame’s perspective) His insanity is somehow cured, and he carries his older sister and bury’s her
• He goes on a rampage to kill monsters
• He realizes he needs to direct his anger into something better, and clears the hospital of monsters and starts it up to help kids who are sick like he was

Writing a book is a daunting feat, but a huge milestone us authors all crave to achieve — and we need all the help and writing practice we can get to write the best story we can.

Outlining and planning your novel before you write it might seem like a chore and hassel, but it doesn’t have to take too long — and it’ll seriously help you once you start writing, giving you an idea of what’s actually going on.

Many people think that an outline is a shackle, something that binds them to a certain version of their story that they can’t change it ever again. They think that the outline controls them.

Just remember — you control the outline. It’s your roadmap that you can always alter and tweak, and it’s just there as a loose guideline that you don’t always have to follow.

When your outline helps, use it. When it doesn’t, don’t!