Now that we’ve got our basic idea, our setting, and our character work put together, we can get into a proper outline.

This process is really difficult to demonstrate through text only, so I may look into screen recording or something, but for now we’re going to work with what we’ve got.

There are multiple types of outlines people use, and if you look up information on outlining you’ll find a lot of different articles and websites, none of which seem to really agree how many kinds of outlines there are. I’ve seen articles that say there are as few as two main types and as many as twelve. I find the ones that get beyond four or five are getting really specific.

I’d say outline types can broadly be grouped as physical (your flash cards, post-its, whiteboard conspiracies, corkboard connection deals), procedural (your snowflake method, flowcharts, roadmaps, etc.), minimal (this would include short bullet points, bookending, I’d even put the single-sentence chapter descriptions in this category), and what I’m going to lovingly call verbose (this would be your chapter-by-chapter outlines, your full scene-by-scene breakdown, basically anything that involves paragraphs and—god forbid—even short scenes).

I’m nothing if not verbose. My current project’s outline is, like, twenty pages long single-spaced. In this case I’m going to try not to go super overboard, and I’m going to hold myself to that by breaking the story down multiple times, from as broad as possible to as specific as necessary.

Needless to say since this is an outline, much like the character work it’s going to be full of spoilers, so if you’d rather not know how the story ends and you just want to follow along as it’s written, this is your spoiler warning.

A Very Broad Overview of the Plot

A mutated outsider, Seth, comes to the floating safe haven of Dam after saving the life of the town’s one medical provider, Pandora. Tensions and mistrust between the unmutated humans and the Shatter-Eyes in the settlement rise as news reaches Dam about Shatter-Eyes using their abilities to ‘revolt’ or to build mutant-only safe havens. Suspicion and fear rise as Seth uses his ability to control the Lesser to save the life of a scout he had hoped to call friend. The forum concludes that Seth is too dangerous to live, so they imprison Pandora to prevent her interference and send Seth to be drowned in the lake; unfortunately for them, Seth loses control when he is about to die and his power activates again, this time controlling the five people closest to him. Seth maintains his control long enough to retrieve Pandora from lockup and to secure a boat from Dam to shore, where the two of them disappear into the wilderness to seek safety and acceptance elsewhere.

Honestly, even that is pretty wordy. I just find it so difficult not to put in more detail so I’m not misunderstood. So, I’m going to let myself do that (a little bit) in another post where I get into the extended, beat-by-beat outline. I would do it in this post, but I’ve been sitting on this for long enough so I’ll come back with more energy later on.