How to Write an Outline for a Romance Novel

Video Transcript

"Alright folks in this clip I am going to teach you how to write an outline for a romance novel. Obviously the most important factor at this point is the story. You want to lock in your story and really feel confident in the pacing and the structure before you start to outline it. That is important. What I suggest doing first of all is doing all the spit balling research that is done before you create the outline first. Get the ideas down on the page, doesn't matter if they are in any particular order or if they even make sense, they are just ideas at this point, get those down then you are ready to create the outline. Now after you have started to create the outline there are basically two ways that you can do this if you are writing a romance novel. 1) You start by summarizing the story in terms of acts, the beginning, the middle, and then the end. You start with the beginning obviously, lay the groundwork, establish the characters, what happens, what events transpire to set up the story and get it moving. Then you move on to the middle where ultimately something bad happens or something happens that causes our two main characters to have to either flee and fall in love at the same time or basically any sort of chain of events that sets the story in motion, summarize that portion, then finally the third act, the finale, the end, that wraps up all the different story lines and plot lines that you had going on and hopefully brings our happy couple together to live happily ever after or you can end your story in tragedy too. But you know that is how you would summarize that outline, the beginning, the middle and then the end. The other way, the way that some folks like to do it is to go and summarize each chapter which personally I would prefer to probably do because it gives you a much clearer perspective on the overall story. You start with chapter one, describe all the events you want to transpire briefly in that chapter, just a quick little summary and you go through it in chapter two and then there is chapter three and you just go through and basically outline each chapter one at a time. That helps you see a much clearer probably bigger picture of the overall novel and helps you plan not just the story and how it transpired but helps you see how many chapters you are going to have and gives you a chance to possibly even name the chapters in advance. That would be the other way to plan to do an outline for a romantic novel and the way that I would strongly recommend. If you are a broader thinker and like to change things on the fly my suggestion would be to go with the first option which is to summarize the three acts of the story from the beginning to the middle to the end. If you are a person who likes to lock in the details and stick to them rigidly you know, you are sure of your idea and you want to go for it from there and not change much I would say list it according to chapters, start at chapter one and work your way all through to chapter sixty, however, many you want to do and that would be the best way to outline your romance novel."