Making an Outline

There are several important things to making an outline. The first thing you should know is that it is okay not to outline things. For some books, I only have a vague idea of how they're going to turn out, but for others it all comes to me quickly. I would say that if you have the entire idea of what's going to happen, go ahead and outline. If you don't, don't worry about it! If you try to force some ideas to come out, it probably won't work.

Another important thing about outlining is that it's best to outline essays and summaries and school writing. Otherwise you'll lose track of your though process and the whole thing will be a mess. But, you can have fun with your outline (if your teacher will let you). You could make a Ven Diagram outline, or bubble chart, or the traditional outline and so on and so on.

I think that it's better to know your characters, for story writing, before you outline. If you don't there is a possibility of the characters being 2D, and we don't want that to happen, now do we? I would suggest a character profile (I'll put a post on it later). They are a lot of fun to do and you can all sorts of information on them on the world wide web. (I just realize that 'world wide' sounds huge, I wonder if there's a RWW for Russia Wide Web or something ;)

So, to put it simply:

• Outline for school writing
• For novel writing, write about your characters before outlining
• Don't outline if you have no idea where the story will go 
• Outlining helps get ideas out and not stuck somewhere in your brain, which is probably cluttered up with a million other things and might not retain the ideas that you have. 

That's all there is to it!!! Tell me if you have any other suggestions on outlining. :)