part0016

We all have someone in our lives who simply won’t tolerate any less than our best, not out of a desire to be difficult, but because they know what we’re capable of. For you, that may be a friend, editor, or coworker. Personally, one of my favorite college professors comes to mind.

Fortunately, these high standards are something we can apply to our own work, even without someone hanging over our shoulder to push us along. Today, you’ll be doing exactly that for your novel, ensuring it meets your expectations on every level.

At this point, the story and characters you’ve outlined are probably good. In fact, they’re probably great! However, there will always be things you miss the first time through. Over the last eight days you’ve undergone an intensive process, so it’s only natural to lose things in the shuffle.

That’s why Day Nine is acts as your final wrap up, giving you a chance to sift through your outline and patch up any last flaws and inconsistencies you may find .

Thanks to this simple round of proofreading, you’ll be able to approach your first draft with confidence, knowing all of your storytelling ducks are in a row. Best of all, by the end of today you’ll have completed your Master Outline!

Today is the last day of this challenge where you’ll make any significant changes to your story. So, before you get to your Master Outline, you’ll want to ensure every part of that story works within your final vision.

While you did a bit of this proofreading yesterday, that was mostly focused on plot. Here, you’ll want to go step by step and review every aspect of your draft outline one last time.

As you go, pay special attention to how these pieces work as a whole. The final question you should ask is: Is this a story you’d be excited to read? If the answer is a resounding “yes,” you’re in a good place!

Of course, it’s natural to feel some doubt at this point, simply because we're always hardest on ourselves. However, Instead of letting this doubt get to you, make a point to cut yourself a little slack and set your nervousness aside. Give yourself credit where credit is due. You’re on the second to last day of an intense challenge, you’ve accomplished a lot, and by the end you’ll have even more to show for it! If you still feel in need of a second opinion, enlist a trusted friend and have them skim through your draft outline. You can even have them quiz you using the questions above if that will help you see your story more objectively.

By the time you’re done reviewing your draft outline, you want to be completely comfortable with the story you’ve created. Once you are, it’s finally time for your Master Outline to take shape.

Throughout this challenge, you’ve been working through your story’s most complex elements in your draft outline, but now it’s time to refine that draft into something more cohesive.

Still, you may find yourself wondering why you can’t just use your current outline as you write your first draft, and there are a few reasons.

To start, your draft outline acts as a paper trail, preserving each stage of your story’s development. If you ever question why you made a certain decision or forget where your original inspiration came from, you can easily track that down in your draft outline. Plus, when you finally hold your finished novel in your hands, there’s something cathartic about looking back over your original ideas and seeing the rough beginnings of what is now a polished piece of fiction.

Additionally, your Master Outline is a more streamlined version of your draft outline. When it comes time to write your first draft, you don’t want to be flipping through pages of old and potentially outdated notes. Instead, you’ll need a clear, organized roadmap to work from, and that’s what this outline will ultimately be. By the end of today, it’ll cover every element of your story in an easy to reference format, alongside a few important additions.

Thus, the first step in creating your Master Outline is pretty much the same as it was for your draft outline—you’ll need to decide what to create it in.

Even if you created the entirety of your draft outline in a notebook or on your computer, think about whether that would be the best place for your Master Outline as well. Remember to consider ease of use, level of distraction, and your overall enjoyment. However, also keep in mind that this Master Outline is meant to be used as a reference while you’re writing your first draft. Make sure that, whatever you create it in, it’ll be intuitive for you to pull out and look through as you write.

With that issue decided on, open a new document or flip to a fresh page in your notebook. At the top, write down your story’s working title and premise. From there, you’ll want to fill out your story’s conflict, your protagonist’s personal struggle, and your Dramatic Question .

You should already know most of these by now—the only one that may trip you up is your protagonist’s personal struggle, but this is simply their stake in the conflict. What do they stand to gain or lose, and what are they struggling to achieve?

When filling these in, leave a blank line beneath your premise, because we’ll be coming back to add some extra information in a moment. Once you’ve finished this, the top of your Master Outline should look something like this:

During the Cold War, a teenaged girl sets out as an undercover agent to spy on their adoptive family—a difficult mission, considering their adoptive parents are spies themselves.

The leader of the KGB is trying to start World War III. Varya begins the story intent on helping him, but will soon turn on him to protect the family that views her as a traitor.

Will Varya stop the Soviets from starting WWIII?

Varya wants to gain respect from her boss by helping him spark a world war, but soon defects. From there she must reconcile what she’s done with who she wants to be, all while struggling to repair the broken trust between her and her adoptive family.

These elements are meant to form a broad overview of what you’ve created, and will be there to remind you of each of the core elements of your story. This also makes this the perfect place to list notes about your worldbuilding, so add those right below this section.

Next, you’ll want to create a more detailed breakdown of your plot and scenes by making your timeline something easier to reference. This will take the longest to set up of all the pieces of your Master Outline, but it will also be what you likely find yourself using the most while writing. Pull out your timeline, because you’ll be using it a lot here.

To create this section, sum up the beginning (Act 1), middle (Act 2), and end of your story (Act 3), each in a single sentence. Leave plenty of space below these, anywhere from a few lines up to an entire page.

After you’ve finished these short sentences, you’ll want to write a longer paragraph covering everything that happens during each portion of your story. These are essentially the summary paragraphs you created all the way back on Day Four, but updated to fit this final version. Once you’ve formulated these paragraphs, write them in their respective sections.

Finally, to finish this portion of your Master Outline, list each section’s scenes beneath the appropriate paragraph. As you go, mark the ones that fulfill any of the various plot points we’ve covered. This portion of your Master Outline will look something like this, though your paragraphs and the list of scenes beneath them will be much longer for your own Master Outline:

The leader of the KGB sends Varya on a special mission to gain access to the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

The story begins at the very end of one of Varya’s missions, where she kills an armed security guard as he follows her through a crowd. Later on, Varya is brought to meet with her boss, the head of the Soviet KGB, and he offers her a secret mission. She accepts and, after some paperwork and a new identity, is put on a flight to America.

At first she dismisses them, but soon Varya finds herself protecting her adoptive family instead of going along with her original mission.

Once in America, Varya meets her adoptive family at the airport. In an attempt to win her over they take her to their local town fair, but she spends the whole time trying to sneak away to contact her superiors back home. After receiving her next mission…

Varya regains the trust of her new family at the last moment, saving them and stopping WWIII all in one go.

After coming to terms with what she’s done, Varya decides she can’t allow her new family to get hurt. She breaks out of prison and goes into hiding. As she uses her skills to hunt her old boss down, she realizes his plan to spark WWIII is about to begin…

This is also when you’ll need to make a decision about how you’ll use your Master Outline. You can either list your scenes with only their short phrase, as I did above, or you can transfer all the information from each of your index cards to your Master Outline itself .

In that instance, you’ll want to create a separate page covering all the details for your scenes, leaving this portion of your Master Outline with just the short phrases. This will make it much easier to search through at a glance.

Personally, I tend to keep my scenes on their index cards and pull out each card to reference as I write my first draft. However, I also write at home, so my cards are easily accessible from my desk drawer. If you like to write at coffee shops, libraries, or another public space, this may be less realistic for you. In that instance, it’s probably worth the time to transfer your scenes to their own page within your Master Outline.

Finally, to finish the bulk of your Master Outline, you’ll be recreating your character sheet and profiles.

This step is fairly simple, because it doesn’t require you to create anything new. All you need to do is transfer your character sheet into your Master Outline itself. Make sure to preserve the alphabetical order of your characters’ names and incorporate your various character profiles into the sheet as well.

By the end, this section of your Master Outline will be structured like this:

The protagonist, a Soviet teen sent to spy on a family of US special operatives with access to important state secrets, she is the prodigy of the head of the Soviet KGB.

I also strongly recommend highlighting your core character profiles within this sheet—just like you did in your draft outline—to make them easier to find at a glance. Again, your Master Outline is all about ease of reference!

With that out of the way, you have the majority of your Master Outline complete. However, there is one final thing you’ll want to incorporate—point of view.

Remember the blank line we left below your premise in your Master Outline? That’s where this will ultimately live.

Put simply, point of view (often abbreviated POV)is the perspective your story is told from, and it plays a big role in how you’ll write your final novel. There are four types of point of view that most fiction writers use:

In this point of view, the narrator of your story is also one of the characters, usually the protagonist. They tell the entire story as “I did/thought/felt/saw/etc…” This means the story is limited to what the narrator experiences.

This is the same as regular First Person point of view, except the narrator is not the protagonist. Instead, they’re a secondary character, and the reader is limited to seeing and experiencing the protagonist’s story through that peripheral narrator’s experiences.

Third Person point of view is where the narrator is not a character within your story. Instead, they tell the story as an outside observer, recounting it using he/she/they.

In a limited Third Person point of view specifically, the narrator is limited to telling the story based on the experiences of a single character, usually the protagonist. They can only guess at what other characters are thinking and feeling based on expressions and conversations, much like First Person point of view.

This point of view uses the same he/she/they pronouns as limited Third Person, but an omniscient narrator has access to every characters’ thoughts and feelings, regardless of which character the story focuses on. This means they can discuss everything that’s happening to every character within the story simultaneously.

We’ve saved choosing one of these points of view until now, because first you needed a solid understanding of the story you wanted to tell. Now that you have that, you just need to decide how you as the author will tell your story.

In the end this will be personal to your novel, but as a general rule, both forms of First Person point of view are best for more intimate stories. This point of view connects your reader directly to your narrator and to their thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, Third Person point of view is more distant, and lets you follow the story much like you’d watch a movie.

Finally, Omniscient Third Person is a special case, more suited for complex stories with a large variety of characters to focus on. Of course, this makes it by far the most difficult to write as well. Either way, there’s really no right or wrong here—it’s ultimately up to you.

Once you’ve chosen your story’s point of view, write it in the space beneath your premise. You’ve officially completed your Master Outline, and almost done with this challenge!

By now, your Master Outline should have:

Throughout this challenge, I’ve talked a lot about what a valuable tool your Master Outline will end up being, but I haven’t really gone into the specifics of why. You see, as you sit down to write your first draft, your Master Outline will become an invaluable roadmap.

Specifically, it should benefit your writing in a few ways:

This is probably the most obvious role your Master Outline will play, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

As you write, you’ll need something to keep you moving forward in your story. By referencing your Master Outline as you finish each scene, you’ll always know what’s ahead of you, allowing you to create a story that flows comfortably into a single whole.

Characters are one of the most difficult parts of writing any novel. They’re naturally complex, just like real people. This is why working through their personalities and goals early on is so helpful .

Now, when you sit down to introduce a new character, your Master Outline will be able to tell you how they’ll act and sound. As you get deeper into your story you’ll also have an idea of how they’ll grow and change as well.

Your Master Outline is a great tool for planning what you need to write and when.

Personally, I work best when I have deadlines to meet. It keeps me honest and makes it less likely I’ll save my work until the last minute. By using your Master Outline, you can set goals for yourself based on how many scenes you want to write or when you want to finish each section of your story. There’s no question how much needs to get done, you just need to decide when you want to finish it and how you want to split it between writing sessions.

On the surface, this may seem like the least intuitive benefit of an outline. How does your Master Outline have anything to do with editing your later drafts?

Well, not only will having a Master Outline make your first draft better overall, but it’ll make it easier to track down issues when you go to edit it. You’ll already have an overview of your story on hand, so instead of shuffling through thousands of words to find a specific problem, you can quickly turn to your Master Outline for guidance.

Finally, you’ll inevitably feel some doubts while working on your first draft. You’re setting out to tackle a big project, and that naturally comes with some anxiety .

However, by going through this challenge, you’ll have your Master Outline always on standby to remind you that your story works . You won’t need to wonder halfway through your draft whether everything will come together in the end—you already have proof it will.

So, whenever you’re stuck, turn to your Master Outline. Somewhere inside, you should find what you need to keep writing!

Tomorrow you’ll complete your final preparations before writing your first draft, but for now, here are the goals you’ve completed for Day Nine: