The Outline

Organization and I have a complicated relationship.

In some aspects of my life, I’m incredibly organized. In teaching, I have folders for each class that I see, and I have timers on my phone so that I can be at each class at the appropriate time. I use my planning periods wisely and ensure that my plans and materials are prepared for the next day.

At home, routines keep me on a schedule that rarely deviates. Get home from work, film my Tiktok for the day, change and workout, shower, make/eat dinner and pack lunch, and work on either my novel or other personal self-improvement goals. Then I pick out my clothes for work the next day, get ready for bed, and read for a bit before I head to sleep.

On the weekends, I generally start laundry and pick up my groceries on Saturday, and I finish my laundry on Sundays while I'm cleaning the rest of the house. On the rare occasion that I go out with friends, adjusting my routines always throws me for a loop.

Routines are part of what keeps me organized, but there is one part of my life - arguably, one of the most important - where organizing hadn't quite clicked for me until recently. My writing.

At the suggestion of my boyfriend, I started implementing a new process to organize my writing to help me reach my goal of being a published author. Two years ago, I decided to create a rough summary of each chapter before I began drafting, which helped me to keep the end in mind. This allowed me to draft a story from scratch in around a year, giving me two manuscripts to work with.

While one novel is being beta read, I’ve been working on revising the other. I transferred my novel from my writing program into a PDF document, read the whole thing through and wrote notes in the margins, then went back and made edits.

During the process, I created note cards to track the two storylines in the story - one past, one present. The present storyline runs chronologically, while the past...well, doesn't. It also runs across a longer period, so I created the note cards to keep track of the events in the order they would have happened. In addition to that, any time I had a thought about the magical powers or character development, I would add sticky notes to the board. This has left me with a board that looks like this:

While this did support me in completing the first draft, it was somewhat less helpful - in fact, downright confusing - for revisions. So, taking from the advice of both my boyfriend and the writing community that I've found on Tiktok, I set out to reverse outline my novel.

I created a spreadsheet that would capture, for each chapter, the types of magic used, the characteristics of that magic (to make sure that I was consistent), the characters in the chapter, the locations, the age of the main character, and a summary of the chapter. At first, I was mainly concerned with making the past part of the storyline make sense, but I found this method helped me to see a broader picture. I was able to easily see inconsistencies and make myself notes to improve things.

When I showed this to my Tiktok friends, I was praised for how organized I was. I didn't think that it was such a big deal until I'd taken a break from it for a few days and was able to come back and see how everything was laid out. It has made a difference in how I'm approaching my next rewrite, making it easier for me to find plot holes and character inconsistencies that I can fix as I go through.

Now, using this outline, I'm able to remake my notecards and move things around as necessary. The old cards, plus the sticky notes that I've addressed already, are going into one of the many notebooks that my mom has gifted me with over the years so that I can reference them if needed.

Going into 2023, I knew that I had a good feeling about my writing this year. I had hoped it would have been me getting published, but it turns out, it was about me finding a process that I both enjoy and look forward to. I know that I will be able to use this process with future novels without much effort.

This whole writing process has been incredibly involved, and I'm so blessed to have people around me to advise and encourage me as I move forward. I'm already excited about how much growth has happened with Awakening, and I can't wait until I can share it with everyone.

In the meantime, I'll continue to refine my writing and editing process. I guess that getting more organized was helpful, after all.