Happy day 16 of Nanowrimo! We’re officially more than halfway through the month, which means this is a good time to sit back for a moment and take stock of your novel so far. If you’re on track, you’ve written about 25,000 words, and you are probably either at or approaching the midpoint of your plot. This is a place where a lot of people get very, very stuck (as we discussed in Sunday’s post), and one of the things I tend to recommend for this is outlining. But what if you hate outlining? What if you consider yourself a hardcore pantser and you’ve never touched or even so much as thought about an outline in your life? Well, friend, you don’t need to know every single thing that’s going to happen in your novel to create a good outline. You don’t even have to know most of the things that are going to happen to reap the benefits of an outline. Today I’m going to share with you my quick-and-dirty method for outlining a book at the midpoint, for purposes of brain-unsticking, internal-logic-untangling, and general fun (which I think outlining is, and I will die on this hill).

The secret is not to outline what you’re going to write – outline what you’ve already written.

You are going to give yourself a time limit for this, because a) this is supposed to be a warmup, and b) you can get into the weeds with this one really easily, which defeats the purpose of this exercise. I would say 30 minutes is a reasonable amount of time to spend dwelling on this for now. In addition to a timer, you’ll need your however-finished draft and some blank paper or a blank word document.

In the interest of time and training ourselves to look at the novel from a high level standpoint, we’re going to use the snowflake method of outlining. The snowflake method is based on the principal that snowflakes grow from the center, becoming more complex as they branch out into tiny, detailed arms. Your story is just like that. It has a premise at its core, which branches out into a bunch of different events, characters, themes, world elements, and scenes. For the purposes of this exercise, we’re actually not going to use the snowflake method exactly as it’s described in articles like this one, but rather a modified, condensed snowflake method that will give us the information we need without getting too into those little branches. We’re not going to dive deep into your characters or worldbuilding, just a few key elements and character emotions.

Ready?

Ok, set your timer and do this stuff, in this order:

1. Write a 1-3 sentence summary of your novel.
2. Answer these questions three:
   • What’s going on when the story starts?
   • What’s the inciting incident – the “but then—” moment that kicks the characters into motion?
   • What’s the big turning point in the middle of the book – the “and then!” moment that sends us barreling toward the climax?
3. Notice that we do not care where or how the book is going to end. Resolve not to worry about it.
4. Zoom in on that bit between the inciting incident and the turning point towards the climax. This is mostly act two, with the tail end of act one in there too probably. A lot of stuff probably happened in there. Write down the 3-5 most significant ones.
5. Attach emotions to each event you wrote down in the last step. Who is involved in each of these events, and what are they primarily feeling during each thing?

If some of that stuff stumped you, it’s ok. Just move on. We don’t want to spend too much time wallowing in all this. The point is, some stuff has already happened in your book, and you know what it was. And you have some rough idea of how you are going to get to the climax, which – and I cannot emphasize this enough – is ten hundred million billion thousand times more difficult to come up with than the events of the actual climax itself. Let’s keep going.

You are probably somewhere in the middle of what you just wrote down. Some stuff I asked you to note is not written yet. Mark where you are in all of this, because we’re now going to focus on the part that comes between now and what is currently the end of your outline. With whatever time is left on your timer, write down everything that needs to happen in order to get your characters from where they are now to that big turning point. Do not worry about how it’s going to happen. Just focus on the results you’re aiming for.

For example, say the tipping point is your main character blaming her ex for the disappearance of her pet unicorn. Instead of “John and Jane have a big fight about which one of them Noodles the Unicorn loves more,” you’d write, “John comes to resent Jane” and “Noodles the Unicorn is mysteriously stolen.” You may not have decided that this is going to be preceded by a big fight. You just know that currently, John and Jane are kind of getting along and everyone knows where Noodles the Unicorn is, and that both of those things need to change. Do this for all of the characters you mentioned when you were doing step 5 above.

I bet it’s a lot clearer to you what has to happen now. I’m not going to tell you how to put your pieces together into a coherent climax – not only is it none of my business, but also, I don’t need to. Seeing it all laid out like this, you’re likely to realize at least one or two things that have to happen. Trust the process, and the rest – or enough of it to make a first draft happen, anyway – will probably fall into place.

Happy writing!