Author: 314 (Yang Chen)
Previously, I discussed how to write outlines in my last article, "How to design your settings and write your overall outline." Please reference that article as well. However, since many authors still seem to have questions, allow me to provide some extra pointers here.
There are two main types of overall outlines. One type is for other people to look at, and the other type is one that you write for yourself.
The first type is an outline used when your editor checks your story. Or, it's what you show to an interested publisher, judges in a writing contest you enter, anime, movie, or game producers that are interested in working with your story, and so on.
Typically, what they request to see is called your story "outline." But actually, its true foundational nature isn't a true outline at all. This type of outline can also be called a story synopsis, summary, and so on.
Writing something like this is actually a simplified method of writing. You're writing such an outline based on others' needs, including what they want to see about the content, word count, important points, and so on. You're satisfying the needs of whoever the person reading this outline is. For example, if your editor wants to see your outline for your story, you should be relatively concise with your words. You need to let your editor understand the overall plot of your story, what cheats are in the story, major story developments, and so on.
A true outline is the one I mentioned that you write for yourself. An outline's purpose is to help yourself, the author. This is its most basic function, which is often forgotten.
Many authors have asked me if the outline is absolutely necessary or not, or if they can skip writing an outline, and so on. These authors evidently don't realize this most basic function of the outline. Obviously, you as the author have full power to decide whether you wish to write an outline or not. Nobody can possibly force you. It's not like there's a teacher that's giving you a homework assignment. So, whether or not you do the outline, and how much of an outline you write, all depends completely on you, the proverbial student. It's all up to the author's own will.
Now then, why should we write an overall outline?
First is to control the tempo of your story. This is because during the long, long process of writing an equally long webnovel, it's typically impossible to keep the author's time taken to write the story, the time passing in the story, and how much time the readers spend reading your story all equal. For example, to use simple algebra as a representation, maybe the author spent x amount of time writing the story, 10x amount of time passed in the story, while the readers only spent 0.5x amount of time reading the story.
So, if you don't have an overall outline helping you to keep your tempo steady, and you just write whatever comes into your mind, it's quite easy for the tempo to become unbalanced. Your story will seem either too slow or too quick to the readers. Either way, it will be a poor experience for the readers.
Apart from controlling your tempo, an overall outline can also help the author set other limitations on their own novel, such as controlling how plots develop.
For example, let's say the plot of your story has the main character going out on a shopping trip because his mother asked him to buy some groceries. However, if you don't put any limits on yourself, and just write whatever comes into your mind, maybe the main character will save a little child on his way to the grocery store, and then he meets the kid's older sister, who just happened to be under unwanted romantic advances by a hooligan. And when your main character is done defeating the hooligan, a white-bearded immortal just happened to pass by and take your main character in as a disciple… Once the main character finished cultivating, one hundred years have already passed by…
So, what ever happened to the groceries that the main character's mom wanted?
Apart from preventing ourselves from going wild, outlines can also give us plenty of hints.
On one hand, during the long process of writing, we can keep adding all our various flashes of inspiration into our outline. As you write your plot, you can naturally recall these flashes of inspiration. If you don't write your flashes of inspiration down, it's quite likely that you'll end up forgetting about them several days later. Or, even if you do recall them, it's probably long past the point in the plot where your flash of inspiration is suitable to be added in your story.
Not only that, the outline can constantly guide us in what direction we should take our overall plot in. To continue using that grocery shopping example, let's say that I'm the story's author, and I developed writer's block as I kept writing. I became confused and didn't know what to write anymore. In that case, if I take a look at my outline, I'd suddenly realize that I should have the main character finally finish his grocery shopping.
This will reduce the chance that you develop writer's block.
All of the above is how an outline can help you when writing. No matter what, you need to understand that writing an outline is in order to help yourself and make things easier on you. An outline will help smooth out the process of writing your story and make it even better. If your outline somehow has the opposite effect, then obviously, you didn't write your outline correctly. In that case, you might as well not write at all.
Now then, what exactly does a correct outline look like?
Actually, outlines come in all sorts of shapes and forms. Let me give a few examples.
"My main character will level up once per 10,000 words for the first 100,000 words. She'll then level up once per 50,000 words for the next 900,000 words. After that, she'll level up once per 100,000 words until I reach the end of my novel."
This outline consists of a total of only 44 words. Does this count as an outline?
Without a doubt, this is an outline. It can even count as a complete overall outline for your entire novel. That's right, this is a complete outline. That's because this outline targets your entire novel, not just a specific portion.
Here's another example.
"The next time my main character levels up, he's going to experience a heaven-sent calamity. His weapon is also going to level up together with him."
Does this count as an outline as well?
Yes, this is also an outline. Of course, this isn't a complete outline, but only a partial one.
Still, I never said that outlines needed to be incredibly detailed or complete. Anything that can help us during the process of creation, no matter how long or short the outline seems, counts as an outline.
That's why there's no such thing as a universal outline. Whatever outline you need is the one that's best for you.
If you're not good at controlling the tempo of your story, that means your outline should have more limitations on your own plots from spiraling out of control. You need to be extra strict with yourself in controlling the word count between each time your character levels up or reaches the climax of a plotline. If you're the type who writes too many subplots at once, and often forget about your own story's important characters and items, then just write all of them into your outline and use them in your story whenever you remember to. And if you're the type who's born with excellent talent in this field and have no problems with controlling the tempo of your story at all, then congratulations, there's no need for you to write an outline at all… Everyone is different.
Of course, for the average author, I would recommend you to write an outline. At the very least, you should try it out and see if the outline helps you or not. If you're absolutely certain that an outline will make things worse for you, then I suppose you can abandon your outline at that time.
The most traditional method to write an outline is to outline your main character leveling up, together with the major events of your story. Or, you should begin fleshing out your blueprint for your story by adding more details.
For instance, to continue using the first example of an outline I gave above which had the main character leveling up once every xxx amount of words, we can now start adding more details to the outline. You could begin by adding various locations to your story and planning out your story's important events. You can set word limits for many important story events, such as how many words before your story changes locations, meets a new danger, begins a new subplot, and so on. Then, we can use your novel's genre to consider more specific scenarios. We can think about whether your main character should start with learning from a teacher, or perhaps being exiled from her family. Should she receive a special cheat ability at the very beginning? Or, maybe the story will start with her fiancé breaking off his engagement to her. Should she gradually level up and become more powerful, or will she do something major right from the very start?
All these storyline scenarios might come into conflict with the leveling up outline presented earlier. In that case, we should put everything together and adjust things appropriately. We said that we wanted the main character to level up once per 10,000 words at the beginning, but maybe the main character in the story is currently undergoing training, and you plan to give a few level-ups once her training is complete, which will take 20,000 to 30,000 words.
In that case, there's a conflict between your plot and your outline, but that's fine. We can just slightly adjust the leveling pace of our story to make it so that she levels up a few times every 30,000 words instead.
However, if the training arc of your storyline is going to take 200,000 to 300,000 words instead, this is obviously going to be a problem. Either you should shorten your plot, change your story, or change your original plan of giving your main character numerous level-ups at once at the end of the training arc, and have her level up a few times in the middle.
This is how we can constantly adjust any conflicts between our storyline and our outline. Once you can excellently combine them together, that means you have a pretty good outline.
Now then, once you have a good outline, do you really need to follow everything it says? What if you go off track?
These are two different questions. For the first question, my opinion is that the answer is yes. Since you went to the trouble of making this outline, of course you should follow it. You don't need to follow it strictly to the letter, but your story should at least be within your outline's framework. Otherwise, there wouldn't even need to be an outline in the first place.
Still, writing isn't anything mechanical where there's only one correct answer. Writing is a creative process filled with our imagination. It's quite common to write a little extra, a little less, or to think of something new in the middle of your storyline. If you follow your outline strictly to the letter, not only will this make you feel awkward, it will also placing restraints on your own creativity.
So, outlines need to be followed, but you don't need to follow them completely. It's not a problem to slightly go off track within limits.
But what if you go completely off track? What if you originally intended this one arc to take up only 30,000 words, but it ended up taking 130,000 words instead, or even 300,000? Or, what if you originally planned to have this important character have an important plot focused around them, but you ended up killing them off instead?
The answer is – you must change. Still, whether you should change your storyline or your outline depends on the situation.
The process of writing contains no absolutely correct answers. There's no such thing as a writing style that's the best or perfect. That's why the outline you came up with at the very beginning might not even be the best choice. So, getting sidetracked from your outline isn't always a bad thing.
If you notice that you have gotten sidetracked from your outline, you should stop and analyze your own story to determine if getting sidetracked is a good or bad thing for you.
In the example where you wrote 300,000 words for the story arc that you only intended to write 30,000 words about, this situation will typically break the storyline's flow for your readers and is almost always a bad thing. If you determine that this is bad for your story, you need to start fixing your own storyline. Either you need to delete words until your 300,000 words become 30,000, or you need to make major changes and add leveling up and climaxes to the middle of your arc in order to not make the story feel too slow for your readers.
As for the example of where you killed off a character and now regret doing so because you wanted to use that character again later, this is quite a difficult situation to analyze. We need to weigh the pros and cons and see which wins out in the end. For instance, if your novel is a suspense type novel, it might even be a good thing to kill off one of the main characters that all your readers believed would survive to the end, as this will increase the overall feeling of suspense and tension in your novel. In that case, you can keep your storyline, and change the later plot you wanted to use and have it revolve around a different character instead. Or, you'll have to write a scenario where this character suddenly comes back to life or was only faking their death.
However, what if there's some authors that don't have enough analyzation ability to know if it's a good thing or bad thing to sidetrack from their outline?
It's very simple. If you can't even decide, then treat it as a bad thing. If you don't have sufficient ability, the best writing method is to strictly follow your outline and immediately change anything you discover that goes off track.
Finally, allow me to give a simple summary.
1. Outlines aren't absolutely necessary, but I recommend that all authors should definitely try writing one.
2. Writing an outline is purely for your own convenience as an author, so you should write an outline in whatever format you desire or prefer. There's no limitations on how to write your outline at all.
3. If you really have no idea how to write an outline, you can try the method of setting word count limits for entering each new location, each plot twist, each climax, level up, and so on. Give yourself clear word count goals for each part of your story before filling it in with details.
4. If you notice that you've gotten off track from your overall outline and need to decide if it's a good or bad thing, make a decision whether you should change your outline or your storyline. If you don't know which you should change, then always change your storyline first.
Author: Yang Chen(314)
The beginning of any story is critically important. This is a fact that I'm sure everyone is aware of. However, just how quantifiable is the importance of the beginning, and how much effort should we spend on the story's beginning? Perhaps not a single author knows.
Actually, webnovel literature has its own unique aspects. The fact that it can be written for a very low cost means that it's unlikely to ever become as well-known as a major blockbuster movie, while its nature of being continually updated with chapters also makes it harder for authors to foreshadow exciting events to be later used in the story.
More importantly, with so many webnovel stories available out there, readers have limited time and patience. They will only choose very few novels from among the crowd to read. They won't stick with an ordinary beginning which they need to spend much time on reading. If your story's beginning doesn't attract them, then it's highly likely that they won't even read your story past the beginning.
If only the beginning of your novel is good, that won't make your novel popular by itself. But without a doubt, having an excellent beginning will help you more than anything to show the advantages of your story. To use an analogy, a good beginning has the power to even revive the dead. However, just what counts as a good beginning?
For newcomer authors, there's only two standards for a good beginning – simple, as well as interesting. Now then, let us begin to analyze how to accomplish these two seemingly ordinary standards.
1. A simple beginning
The beginning of your novel is more important than anything else in determining whether your readers will pick up your novel or not. From a certain standpoint, the beginning serves as an advertisement for your novel.
We can completely categorize the beginning of your novel and the main storyline as completely separate categories. In other words, you can view your novel as an advertisement in the beginning, combined with the main storyline that comes after that.
Without a doubt, most readers won't choose to read your main storyline unless they're attracted by your advertisement. Also, most readers won't have too much patience in reading a boring or long advertisement.
So, this advertisement of yours needs to both be as attractive as possible, and as short as possible. The less irrelevant information, the better.
For newcomer authors in particular, you absolutely have to remember that the beginning is incredibly precious. But, what's precious aren't your words themselves, but the amount of space they take up!
So, just how should we have a concise beginning that doesn't take up too much of our precious space? We can try it starting with the following three factors.
(1) Deleting any irrelevant content
Some newcomer authors without any experience treat the beginning just like their main story by describing each little scene in great detail, or even adding filler. This is obviously unwise.
For the story's beginning, we should carefully consider each and every line of dialogue, description, and even each individual word. Are these truly meaningful? Is this word or sentence absolutely required for my beginning?
If I delete this paragraph, will it greatly decrease the effectiveness of advertising my beginning? If I delete this sentence, will it greatly affect the plot of my story?
If the answer is "Yes," then you can keep this sentence or paragraph. Otherwise, no matter how much you as an author love your own words, there's no reason for these words to continue being in your story's beginning. We should grit our teeth and make the sacrifice.
(2) Decrease any specialized information
What specialized information refers to is information that readers will unconsciously try to pay attention to and remember. This includes any words you've invented for your story, the setting, the storyline, and so on. To be more specific, this means the names of the people in your story, locations, technique names, character relationships, etc. etc…
Let's use characters as an example. How many characters should you have appearing in your beginning?
The answer is quite simple. As long as the plot permits it, apart from the main character who's absolutely necessary, it's best with as few characters as possible.
This is because if you have other characters appearing, the readers need to spend extra effort on remembering these characters' names in order to differentiate them. The readers will also try to understand these characters' identities, along with their relationships to the main character and each other. In fact, readers might even have trouble differentiating who the real main character is. Without a doubt, this is adding additional specialized information.
This is why as long as your plot permits it, it's best to have as few characters in the beginning of your novel as possible. Anyone that isn't critically necessary to your storyline shouldn't be appearing.
Other settings are the same as well. Any specialized information that's not absolutely necessary is something that should be heartlessly deleted by us. Although a short sentence describing a setting might not take up many words, these few words might cause the readers to lose interest in your novel, which will be much worse than having this meaningless scenic description in your story.
(3) Put the necessary but boring information later in your story
Sometimes, it is indeed necessary to write some somewhat boring but absolutely necessary content in your novel, such as the background of your world, any special settings, character relationships, and so on. In addition, some storyline content, such as the tragic life of your main character before the story began, might not be absolutely required, but if it's not there as a comparison, it will make the rest of your story seem lesser without it.
In such a situation, rather than forcing ourselves to write this somewhat boring content in our beginning where every word is precious, we can try something else instead – is it possible for us to put this information later in our story instead?
For example, the background of your story. Could you try to put it a bit later in your story and introduce the world to us slowly as the story unfolds? Does it really have to appear in the first chapter? Is it absolutely necessary for you to tell us about the world before you tell your story?
If it's possible for you to place it later in your story, then why don't you simply push it to later so that you can have a simple, effective, and excellent beginning?
2. An interesting beginning
What is an interesting beginning? More accurately speaking, it's a "beginning that can attract readers." Your beginning should swiftly show the most interesting elements in your story, along with whatever unique storyline points you have, so that you can tightly hold on to more readers and make them desire to read past your beginning.
What needs to be noted is that the most appealing points in webnovels aren't what you'll typically find in traditional novels. Webnovels don't require fierce fighting, eloquent wording, or mystical suspense. Instead, webnovels require more self-fulfillment factors. Or, that is to say, the readers should learn about what's so special regarding your main character, so that they can see the main character's bright future.
To analyze the true purpose of most webnovel readers, they don't read your novel for the sake of reading. Instead, the purpose for reading your novel is that they're hoping to enter the story together with your main character and experience a fulfilling and wonderful life filled with adventure and excitement.
And obviously, an appealing beginning should help the readers to swiftly understand that this is such an excellent book which can satisfy their desires.
For this purpose, you as an author naturally need to choose an appropriate topic and content to write about. But, without changing your topic or storyline, newcomer authors can try the following simple techniques.
(1) Put some of your best scenes in the beginning
As for the beginning of your story, perhaps some authors will say that it's easy to talk about but difficult to write. If it was that easy to write a brilliant beginning, wouldn't all authors write one? If they had such excellent and appealing scenes, would any author intentionally not use it?
Let me ask you a question. Do you as an author simply lack an interesting scene in the beginning, or do you lack interesting scenes throughout your entire story? If it's the latter, then I would recommend that you stop writing your book. Instead, you should read over my guide on how to choose a topic to write about and come up with a new idea for a novel.
If it's the former, then why don't you simply bring one of your later planned interesting scenes to the beginning? Do you intend to continue writing without a single reader, enjoying your several hundred words long novel by yourself?
Let me give you an example of a cliché storyline.
The main character is an orphan who was bullied ever since young, causing him to have a difficult life. One day, an immortal took favor with him and brought him to the realm of immortals, where he learned amazing abilities. The main character then returned to the mortal realm and accomplished great feats…
Although this type of storyline is quite simple and cliché, it will still attract a sufficient audience as long as you're a skilled writer. According to normal authors' thought processes, the novel should of course be in chronological order, with events happening in accordance to the plot. However, the problem with this is that such a beginning will doubtlessly be quite boring and even feel suppressive to read. This will make it quite hard to attract readers.
The way to solve this problem is quite simple. Simply bring some of the later miracles you planned into the beginning.
For example, start off with your main storyline, which is the main character meeting an immortal and learning mystical techniques. Then, the main character is so excited that he starts reminiscing about the past, when he was always bullied… After that, the story won't have any differences from your original planned storyline at all. You can simply tell the rest in chronological order.
With such a change, simply adding a few sentences to the beginning of your story from your main storyline will give the readers something to look forward to. Similarly, you don't have to write about some sort of miracle. You can use something else you think is interesting from your main storyline, or you could even begin with the planned ending of your novel. For instance, in the same story example, you could write about how your main character has conquered the entire Earth and is quite satisfied with himself. Then, he starts reminiscing about the past and all his achievements over the years, despite the fact that he started out as nothing but a bullied orphan, making it all this way through his efforts…
Obviously, by placing such a selling point in the beginning, this will help your novel to increase in self-fulfillment factors.
However, when you place something from your main storyline in the beginning, you also need to worry about spoiling your own plot. You should consider whether doing so will affect the suspense level of your storyline, which will actually negatively impact the reading experience.
So, with the two examples given above about how to put one of your best scenes in the beginning, the latter example runs the risk of spoiling your own story. This is why it's simply an example. In most cases, it's not recommended to actually start by writing the end of your novel in the beginning.
(2) Make your main character seem special in the beginning
What special means here can refer to many things. It can be in any area or any method.
For example, you could make your main character into a martial arts genius who needs only one time to learn anything. Or, you could say that your main character has a unique body that's capable of cultivating power levels at a rate of ten times faster than everyone else. Not only will this show your main character's amazing potential, this is also hinting that your main character won't be so ordinary in the future. With such a beginning, readers will typically be far more willing to continue reading.
Actually, the "special" referred to here doesn't even need to be something positive. You don't have to have a main character that's overly strong, incredibly smart, or ridiculously handsome. You could even take things in the opposite direction.
For instance, you could write that your main character is so stupid that he still hasn't learned how to talk or walk at three years old. Or, you could say that your main character is really slow at learning martial arts. Perhaps some basic martial arts technique that takes others only a few days to learn will take your main character more than ten years without even mastering such a basic level technique.
This type of setting may seem like it's going against the self-fulfillment factors that readers love so much, but, when readers see such a beginning, they'll have expectations as well. That's because they'll already understand that there's surely a reason for the main character to be so stupid. Or, maybe the main character will encounter a miracle in the future. And, with such a unique main character, it will give them a sense of freshness, which will make readers curious and want to read more.
(3) Add a short and simple prologue
If your novel is the type that's difficult to express its appeal at the beginning, and your plot isn't one where it's appropriate to bring something into the beginning, then you should consider adding a short and simple prologue to the beginning of your novel that can express the self-fulfillment factors of your novel.
There's two types of novels that are particularly suited for such a beginning.
The first type of novel is a novel where some special artifacts or techniques are involved throughout the entire storyline.
With such a novel, here's an example of a simple prologue you could write: describe how some ancient person from several thousand years ago received this powerful artifact which helped him to achieve incredible things, and then jump to the beginning of your storyline and the present day, where your main character is only an ordinary person who accidentally came across a mysterious object…
At this time, perhaps the main character doesn't even know that this object is actually a powerful artifact. However, you can describe this artifact to be identical to the one in the prologue, which will cause all the readers to understand that the main character has picked up an unbelievable treasure.
This way, the readers will already be motivated to read more. Even if the main character doesn't even know how to use the artifact yet, the readers will still maintain their interest for a period of time.
Similarly, it's the same way with martial arts manuals. When your main character receives a martial arts manual, you don't need to have him learn it immediately. Perhaps he'll only think that it's a joke or that it's useless. Maybe he'll even casually leave the technique manual in his home. This will cause the readers to wonder just when he'll find out about the technique manual's true power.
The other type of novel that's most suitable to use this prologue technique is one with mystical elements that aren't the best to appear in the beginning of your novel. This type of novel typically begins with a rather ordinary life based on reality, which will cause readers wanting to see mystical elements to run away from your novel.
So, that's where you could narrate in a small prologue two powerful individuals having a fight, or maybe having just one powerful individual showing off their skills. This way, readers will understand what your book is really supposed to be like, and your novel will attract readers that enjoy this genre.
What newcomer authors particularly need to note is that this type of prologue needs to be simple and concise. You should use as few words as possible.
For example, when writing a fierce fight in your prologue, just use one or two sentences. Never, ever try to use some powerful action scenes to attract readers.
If it's in the middle of your story and the readers already know who all your characters are, then one of your most popular characters participating in a major fight will indeed become an interesting scene to read. However, in the beginning of a story where readers know nothing about your characters at all, that means no reader will feel any sense of self-substitution with your characters that are basically just strangers. Besides, readers have seen plenty of major fight scenes before, so it won't really seem that special to them at all.
This is why you definitely can't have a long prologue of this type. You only need to reveal some information about what your novel will be like. That's all your prologue needs to do.
Also, in normal cases, it's not recommended for the author to have an entire chapter dedicated to the "prologue." Better would be to add the prologue directly to the first chapter, and having it only take up half or even less than half of the first chapter.
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