Timelines and Outlines for Plotters

The Writing Foundations Series: Outlines and Timelines are useful tools for plotters, planners, and other type A writers

From what I’ve been told, not everyone needs an outline. 

I spend many, many hours having discussions with students about whether they used an outline, if they can show me their outline, the inevitable “but I gave you the outline I wanted you to follow, so why didn’t you use it?” conversation about their outline, and more. For some reason outlines give many writers the ick.

I am not immune to this rejection of formalized planning. I even recall being in high school and being asked to make outlines. I would get so fixated about where the Roman numerals went vs where the letters went that I found them slowing me down more than helping me. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how useful outlines were and I found a way to make them work for me (no Roman numerals or tiny letters needed). 

An outline is a tool that I find incredibly useful for organizing my thoughts. I don’t even really like to call it an outline as much as a list of events that need to happen in the book. But that’s a little wordy. 

When I have a story in my brain, particularly because I write mysteries, I usually know how it ends before I start writing. I think about who did it as soon as I first envision my victim and my detective. I think about how they are caught before I even have all my clues, red herrings, and other necessary genre conventions. 

But because I know this and I need to intentionally lead the reader there, an outline helps me not to jump over important information to solve this puzzle I am creating. 

I have seen outlines for novels appearing more and more in writing spaces online: outlines for certain genres, outlines for A and B plots, outlines for weaving in subplots, outline grids with different colors for characters. And while I am a proud and affirmed plotter, whenever I see these outlines or when a student of fellow writer shows me these outlines, I want to run out of the room like my hair is on fire.

Any type of prescriptive writing plan is one that makes me want to become a pantser.

Knowing that I need the list and that I don’t like being told what to do – and the fact that I need tactile evidence of progress – I write up an outline in a doc and then create notecards. 

Learning this about myself took some trial and error. With Mothers of the Missing Mermaid, I had a timeline of events but I wanted to tell it out of order. I took my chronological list of events then I cut and paste it in the order that I wanted to tell the story. This could have been easily done on a computer, but I was itching to use scissors and clear tape, so I assembled this onto a roll of craft paper while binge watching Grey’s Anatomy. It hung over my desk while I typed.

For Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder, I knew I wanted to tell the story from multiple points of view. I was also itching to use some notecards. I assigned one colored marker to each character – Gabbi - pink, Jenna - yellow, Lindy - blue – and colored the edges of their cards that were assigned to them. Also, for some off the page work and events that needed to be noted but was neither reported or observed by one of those points of view, I marked those in gray and called them “ghost scenes”. I also highlighted the name of the person whose POV it was told in the upper right-hand corner. When it was time to write a scene, I would pull the card. I could have written it focusing on one character at a time and then weaving the voices all together like Barbara Kingsolver did for The Poisonwood Bible but I worried I would veer too far into their individual backstories and lose the point of the story which was a murder mystery.

For the new novel I am starting now, I am going back to notecards. There is only one point of view and only one timeline, so it will be chronologically told. However, considering that underneath is a larger mystery, I have to work with different layers so by the end of the short series, everything will align. I don’t want any Pretty Little Liars plot holes, not that the fans ever really minded.

But before I can even create the outline, I have to create a timeline of events document. For mysteries, this is kind of fun, because you can treat it like a Law and Order timeline of the murder exposition dump. I have to think about the time and space where all these events are happening and how long it takes for the mystery to unfurl. And because the underlying mystery happened years ago, I have to consider how things have changed since then. Like I was thinking about how an amateur sleuth would have recorded audio testimonial evidence in 2004. Digital recorder? Not everyone would have had an iPhone then. 

For Mothers of the Missing Mermaid, I created this digitally and printed it out onto a landscape orientation. I could bind it in my planner and unfold it when I needed to confirm when an event happened. It unfurled like a naughty centerfold.

For Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder, I also drew it out digitally but left it on my tablet because it was my new mobile workstation anyway. 

I haven’t made the timeline for the new project yet, but I will be drawing it in GoodNotes and then possibly print it to hang on the studio wall.

This is not to say that nothing changes. Of course things change. That’s the interesting thing about writing is that no matter how well you have it mapped out, there will always be unforeseen curves in the road. But if I have everything planned out, I am more adept at navigating them. 

XOXO,

B.

I like to post images of my workspace and foundational materials on social media, so if you are looking for me, I am mostly on Instagram these days @thebrandibradley. 

And if you have not snagged your copy of Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder, be sure to ask for it at your local indie bookstore or head over to the shop and order your copy today! In June, $1 of all sales will go toward Lost-N-Found Youth in Atlanta, a non-profit assisting LGBTQ persons experiencing homelessness.

Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder

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