My new outline board

If you ever have the misfortune to ask, I'll tell you--ad nauseam--about how I like to outline my books. I wasn't always an outliner, but then I started researching what would become Samurai Shortstop, and I realized I was going to have to organize my story and my notes if I ever hoped to pull it off. The outline worked, Samurai sold, and I've become an outline evangelist ever since.

Until recently, I've done all my outlining on the computer, in a Microsoft Word document, with one page per chapter, followed by any research notes, if any, I need to write that chapter. But while I like having the pages to print out and put in a binder when I'm ready to actually write the book, I dislike how this arrangement works for figuring things out in the early stages. When I'm first building a story, I like to move things around, to change the timing and placement of events, and get a feel for the overall pacing of things. It's certainly easy to cut and paste on the computer, but it's hard to see the big picture one page at a time.

So now I've got a big board in my new office where I can see the whole story laid out in front of me all at once. Don't you love the fabric? It was an IKEA find.

I don't go into a great deal of detail on the cards at this stage. Each of the note cards roughly corresponds to a single chapter, and just tells me the big stuff that happens in each to drive the story forward. Using the big board for my early planning stages, I can add to, subtract from, or rearrange the story while seeing the whole big picture right in front of me. Once this process is finished, I take the cards off the board, type them up as a chapter outline in Word, and there add all the detail I need to make the story sing. But the big board helps out in those key early stages where I'm trying to make sure the action, characters, and reveals are all well-paced.

I also separate the cards by act, as I've done here, letting me see if one act or another is too long, too short, or breaks at the right or wrong time in the story. Here's act two, of three:

The cards floating off to the side of the main columns are dream sequences--I know, dream sequences! I promise, I'm trying to make them not be cheesy--and using the big board I can rearrange them to put them wherever they work best alongside the major plotline of the book.


Act three out there is looking a bit skimpy, but I think it will fill out in the writing. It often happens that I plan too much for my chapters, and end up breaking them into separate chapters.

The plotting on this book is finished, and I'm on to the writing phase--but I had to show off my beautiful new outlining board!