BellaOnline Forums Career Fiction Writing Creating a novel outline

Last week we started the process of creating chapter summaries in a specific Style. This week's article takes this concept a step further by generating an automatic Novel Outline from your chapter summaries.

I never thought about a TOC as an outline of sorts. Of course I am not breaking the book down in chapters yet either. I won't do that until I am finished with it.

I need to do something though because if I go days without writing in it, then I usually have to reread some of it to see what I left off with to see where I have been and where I am going with the paricular storyline at the time.

Any suggestions on how to keep track without a TOC or re-reading what I have written?

(Looking a little sleepy there Vance... )

Even without chapters, you could still use the summary idea. I would suggest that at the end of each day's writing, you spend a few minutes writing a brief summary of what you have covered in that session (very brief: A meets B, argument, C intervenes, etc).

It might be best if you put this in a separate file so that you're not tempted to read over the manuscript itself. Then when you come back to it a few days later, you can read your summaries to that point and see where you got to, and then head to the end of your manuscript to start writing.

Thats a great idea Elle. Thank you. And I look A LOT sleepy there lol.

You're welcome. I hope it helps.