Example of outline Ugly Girl, the first scenes
As an example of my way of outlining, I plot every little scene that is happening on a timeline. The sync-function in Aeon Timeline syncs all these events to Scrivener, my writing program.
Depending on your eyesight, you may see above the Walk in the Forest. It takes place on Monday 7 February 2028. The time is irrelevant for the story, so I skip the time, only the date matters.
The next thing I have to do is where this event fits in my story. For now, it’s in the first scene, but that may change, of course. Some events don’t end up in the book, but are important for me as a reminder.
The walk in the Forest is the first scene in the book. I made a short description of what happens in the scene:
Koen invites out of the blue Zuzanna for a walk in the forest. He tells her he is going to die soon, and that she is the first to know. He wants to ‘give’ Sylvia away to Zuzanna after he is gone, but Zuzanna thinks this is too crazy for words.
On the right bar of the screen you see who is in that scene: Koen de Groen, 66 years, 7 months and Zuzanna Sówka, 65 years and 3 months. They are the participants in the scene, my main characters. In some scenes, there are some people present but are not relevant to the scene. I want to list them as “observer”, because in a different view I can see the age of the all the people that were present during that event.
I add in what book(s) the scene takes place. In this case, Ugly Girl, but some scenes are also mentioned in Good Girl or Bad Girl as well. The scenes are grouped by Book in my timeline, so the book is relevant. I did not add location here, because I do not want to make a list of a thousand locations in my location folder. If the location appears only once in the book, I omit filling in Location.
Relates to groups all the scenes in one chapter, and the ‘save the cat story beat’ tells me how this scene fits into the structure of my story.
You are right. It’s a lot of work. Does it have a purpose? Does it help to outline this way, and does it make the story better?
We will find out, won’t we? For now, it helps me. Filling out all this metadata has become a bit of a routine, so – providing my thoughts doesn’t go so fast I can’t keep up entering data – goes quickly enough.