Outline is essential
Road Map
We’ve got 53,616 words down on paper, not including notes and cut scenes. Okay, not actually on paper, but in the computer, and backed up on various flash drives and external hard drives.
We’ve got some awesome scenes written. In one scene, the three younger girls are investigating the disappearance of an old widow. They decide to visit her house (at night, of course) to see what they can find. The scene includes a body, puke and a digital video recorder among other things.
In another scene, the three younger boys are assigned to get information from the town’s oldest resident. While inside the old guy’s house, they get separated and two of the friends end up locked in the basement. They soon discover they’re not alone.
But we have some issues.
The scenes are well-written and the kids are great. However, we need to continue to advance the story. We had a problem and it took many discussions to come to a conclusion as to where these events would best fit in. We made up a pretty comprehensive outline of the story and input the outline into the novel-writing software. Now it looks almost as if you’re reading the ultra-condensed Readers Digest version of the book. Constructing an outline of the story is something we should have done months ago.
Making an outline of your book is important. We wasted a lot of time shuffling things around. We also engaged in some heated debates. The problem was not so much about where the scenes would go into the book, but more because we frustrated ourselves from the lack of an outline.
The outline is like a road map. We knew where we started, of course, and we knew pretty much where we want the story to go. Our problem came from not having a road map to show us how to get from here to there.
Getting from the start of the book to the finish–a road map–that’s what the outline is for. Uh-huh…duh.