The last post about my revision process is here! Once I finished the prolonged Planning Stage, it was all too easy to move on to the third and final Outlining Stage, which is why there’s a much shorter gap between this post and the last. 🙂
The Outlining Stage probably sounds pretty straightforward; most writers understand what an outline is and how to make one, whether they do so or not. That’s why I’m going to focus on my particular outlining strategy for this revision instead of going the general route. Even if you don’t end up borrowing my whole approach, there will hopefully be some piece of it that appeals to you or gives you ideas that you can apply to your own outlining process.
Before I started outlining though, I took my list of story issues and the document I’d created to reorganize and fix my plot and I used them as resources to create another document containing a more specific list of changes I need to make during this revision pass. I broke this list of changes down into the same categories I used in my story issues document–characters and character arcs, plot and event specific changes, rewrite (or write) this, and logistics and inconsistencies–plus one extra: back story elements to include.
Making that list wasn’t too tricky. Mostly, it gave me an excuse to go through the original list of story issues one more time and identify the ones that my re-plotting and character edits had inadvertently fixed. And once I’d finished, it served as a reference point as I outlined–or re-outlined–Part 1 of my manuscript.
Because my beginning was pretty solid, most of the changes I had to incorporate were minor, and I was able to work from the original outlines I’d created for the first few chapters of my first draft. But as I moved further along in the story and had to incorporate plot changes or shifts in character relationships on a larger scale, I found myself re-creating chapter outlines from scratch based on a combination of a) the elements I’d chosen to carry over from the first draft, b) the plot points I’d changed, and c) the general list of changes I needed to make.Â
Bit by bit, I made it through the whole of Part 1 that way.
Once each chapter outline was finished, I asked myself a series of craft-based questions–compiled from my ‘Things to Consider’ list–in an effort to confirm that I hadn’t lined up a whole bunch of redundant, low conflict scenes that I’d be bored by when I sat down to write them. Those questions were as follows:
1) Are the beginning and ending of this chapter strong?
2) Are the protagonist’s goal, the conflict, and the stakes clear in each of the scenes in this chapter?
3) Is there an immediate threat, surprise friend/enemy, or overarching threat in each of the scenes in this chapter? (For a more involved look at what this refers to, check out this awesome post from Pub(lishing) Crawl.)
4) Can I stick ‘but’ or ‘therefore’ between each of my scenes, or am I relying too much on ‘and then?’ (This is a handy little shortcut for determining whether your scenes contain enough conflict and tension. ‘But’ and ‘therefore’ imply that there are complications resulting from the decisions your characters make and the action they take. All ‘and then’ implies is that another thing has happened.)
These questions forced me to get really honest with myself about where my outlined scenes had fallen short and allowed me to come up with appropriate fixes before I’d written hundreds or even thousands of words. While I obviously don’t know if the outline(s) I’ve created will hold together on the page, having them has given me a big confidence boost. And when you’re about to dive into a big revision, you need all the extra confidence you can get.
I hope this short series on my revision process has been helpful. If you wind up borrowing any of these strategies, I’d love to hear how they worked for you!
Do you outline your manuscripts, and if so, how? Leave me a comment and let me know!