As the owner of a nonfiction publishing company, and as someone who has spent decades as a writer, book coach, and editor, there is one hill I will die on:
You need an outline.
A lot of writers can concede that point in theory. Actually figuring out how to outline a nonfiction book, though, can prove much more challenging than they expected.
Part of the problem is that there is no single outline that works for every kind of nonfiction. A memoir needs something very different from a book built from years of podcast episodes or newsletters. A persuasive book arguing for a particular change needs something different again.
So rather than giving you one giant outlining formula and asking you to somehow squeeze your book into it, I want to walk you through three approaches: a narrative outline, a topical or content outline, and a persuasive outline.
Before we dive in, let me make the case for why I am so adamant that you outline at all.
Why You Need an Outline for a Nonfiction Book
The most craft-based reason is pretty simple: when you are writing a book, you are necessarily in the weeds.
You are thinking about the word in front of you, the sentence you are trying to finish, the paragraph that is not quite working, or the chapter you have been wrestling with all week. Those individual pieces tell you very little about the shape of the book as a whole.
Think about an average business book that might run 45,000 to 60,000 words, or a memoir that might be closer to 60,000 to 80,000 words. You cannot realistically hold all of those words—and how they relate to one another—in your head while you are drafting sentence number 3,162.
That is what your outline does for you.
When you have an outline with enough detail to understand the book at a glance, you give yourself a 10,000-foot view of the project while still allowing yourself to work down in the weeds. It lets you see how the section you are writing today fits into everything else you are trying to accomplish.
That makes your writing more intentional. You are not simply producing words during today’s writing session. You are producing the particular words your larger book needs.
We talk about this constantly with memoir writers because an outline gives the book its structural spine, but the same principle applies to almost every kind of nonfiction.
An outline also becomes your writing plan
Books are long in another sense too: they take a long time to write.
Sure, I have worked with people who can write an entire manuscript in a couple of months, and I am endlessly impressed by them. Most of us are not doing that. A year or a year and a half is a completely reasonable timeline for writing a book.
Without a plan, that is a very long time to remember where you thought you were going.
If you simply start writing and hope you will find your way, it is incredibly easy to become lost after a few chapters. An outline gives you something concrete to return to. You can sit down on Tuesday afternoon, look at the chapter you planned, and know what today’s job is.
It can also give you flexibility.
If you are writing a memoir and the next chapter contains an emotionally difficult scene you simply cannot tackle today, a good outline lets you skip ahead. You know what happens in the next chapter and what that chapter needs to accomplish, so you can work there instead.
Will the manuscript still need revision?
Of course. I am very sorry to tell you that no outline will save you from revision.
But you are much more likely to make it through the long drafting process with an actual manuscript rather than tapering off three or four chapters in. That’s one reason I am so resistant to the idea that writers should just start writing and figure the book out later. You can start that way, but at some point, those exploratory pages need to become a plan.
Your outline keeps one book from becoming three books
There is another challenge that comes with writing a book over a long period of time, particularly for expert authors.
You keep learning.
If you spend a year writing your book, your perspective will probably change somewhat during that year. You will read something new, work with new clients, have new experiences, or develop your thinking in ways you could not predict at the beginning.
Some of that new material may absolutely belong in the manuscript.
But without an outline, the book itself can start changing direction every time you do.
You begin with one concept. Three months later, you become interested in something adjacent and start writing about that. Six months later, there is another piece you desperately want to include. By the end, you have written several interesting pieces of several different books.
That is not especially helpful if what you wanted was one finished book.
A strong outline becomes a North Star. New ideas can still come in, but now you have a way to evaluate them: does this belong in this book?
That question alone can save you an enormous amount of revision.
If you are still in the stage where you are figuring out which idea actually belongs at the center, start with developing your book idea before you begin drafting.
Once that idea is clear, we can decide how to outline a nonfiction book around it.
Method #1: Use a Narrative Outline
The first method is best for memoir and other forms of narrative nonfiction.
With a narrative outline, your primary goal is to create an engaging arc.
This is where I sometimes hear writers say, “I already have structure. I divided the manuscript into three parts.”
Parts can certainly indicate structure, but they do not create a narrative arc on their own.
A narrative needs specific points of conflict, tension, growth, and change that build toward a climactic moment and eventually resolve. That is true whether you are writing memoir, biography, narrative journalism, or another nonfiction book that depends heavily on story.
For memoir especially, I like to start by clarifying two things: your topic and your message.
Your topic tells us what concrete slice of your life the memoir is actually covering. Your message tells us what you ultimately came to understand through that experience. Those two things work together to determine which events belong in the book and which ones do not.
If you are still wrestling with those distinctions, we have a full explanation of how memoir topic and message work together and another on why your memoir needs a clearly defined topic.
Once those are dialed in, I want to identify several major structural moments.
(And before we dig in, if you’d like step-by-step instructions for applying all of this, our 7-Step Structure Sequence will walk you through the process.)
Around 25%: The desperate step
About one-quarter of the way through the book, the conflict around your protagonist—in memoir, that is you—should become strong enough that they have to make a choice.
I call this the desperate step.
If you are imagining a memoir with around 20 chapters, this might happen around chapter five.
The important thing is not the exact chapter number. The important thing is that something changes. Your protagonist cannot simply continue as they were before.
Around 50%: The misguided step
The midpoint comes halfway through the manuscript.
I call this the misguided step because this is usually the point where the protagonist starts to understand that they have some agency. They make a choice. They try something.
Unfortunately, they still do not quite understand the problem.
So the choice matters, but it does not actually get them where they need to go.
That is useful dramatically because the protagonist is no longer simply responding to events. They are trying to change their circumstances, even if they do not yet know how.
Around 75%: The epiphany
At around three-quarters of the way through, we get the epiphany.
The epiphany is not the climax.
It is the point where the protagonist finally understands something they did not understand before. They can see the path forward, even though they have not successfully walked that path yet.
That leaves the final quarter of the book for us to watch them put that understanding into practice, move through the climax, and eventually reach resolution.
When you map those major points—25%, 50%, 75%, and the climax—you suddenly have something much more useful than a pile of stories.
You have progression.
Now when you are planning the first quarter, you know it has to get us to that desperate step. The second quarter needs to set up the misguided step. The third must move toward the epiphany.
That is the 10,000-foot view we were talking about earlier.
Without it, you can write and write and write without actually going anywhere.
If you want the process itself walked out for you, our Memoir Method 7-Step Structure Sequence takes you through topic, message, structural turning points, and the final outline step by step.
Method #2: Build a Topical Outline From Your Existing Content
The second method for how to outline a nonfiction book is especially useful if you are already a content creator.
Maybe you have years of blog posts.
Maybe you host a podcast or have appeared on dozens of other people’s podcasts.
Maybe you have newsletters, videos, keynote talks, workshops, social media posts, or other places where you have already been putting your ideas into the world.
People in this position are often understandably resistant to the idea that they should “start over” to write a book.
You do not need to throw all of that material away.
But you also should not simply copy and paste it into a manuscript.
The job here is to identify the ideas underneath your existing content and then organize those ideas into a cohesive book.
Step 1: Gather everything
This is probably the hardest part.
Gather the blog posts, transcripts, speeches, newsletters, social content, interview notes, videos—whatever contains material you may want to use.
Take an inventory before you try to decide what the book looks like.
Step 2: Create three columns
I prefer to do this in Excel or Google Sheets, although note cards work perfectly well if you like being able to physically move things around.
Create three columns:
Idea | Source | Topic
Then work through the content you collected.
In the Idea column, briefly describe the actual idea, story, principle, example, or research point contained in that piece of content.
In Source, link back to wherever it came from. This is purely practical. Six weeks from now, when you want to find the podcast interview where you told that perfect story, you will be very glad you did this.
Then comes Topic.
For every idea, ask: what larger topic does this belong to?
Do not worry too much about getting these categories perfect on the first pass. Just start labeling them.
As you work, patterns will emerge.
Maybe you discover you have twenty pieces about cooking, two about cookware, three about family, and four about pets.
Well, okay. We have learned something.
Either some of those ideas do not belong in the book, or we need to rethink the categories until the material starts fitting together in a meaningful way.
That is exactly what we want this process to reveal.
One of the biggest dangers for expert authors is assuming that because all of their ideas are interesting, all of those ideas belong in the same book. They usually do not. I have talked more about that in What Should You Write About? and Do You Have Enough Material to Write a Book?.
Step 3: Turn the clusters into an actual outline
Once you can see the clusters, start putting them into order.
What does your reader need first?
What becomes possible to understand only after they have learned something else?
Which ideas naturally build on one another?
Where are you repeating yourself?
Which category is enormous while another has almost nothing in it?
At this point, make an actual chapter-by-chapter outline.
Do not leave the structure living in the spreadsheet and assume you will remember the rest.
The outline is your plan for how those ideas become a book.
And no, you probably will not be able to copy and paste every old piece of content wholesale. The book needs to feel like one cohesive project rather than an archive of things you have previously said.
For business owners and experts, that process can actually clarify your thinking beyond the book itself. I have written before about how writing a book can clarify your business and purpose and how a strategically focused book can support the growth of the business around it.
If this is your situation, we also have a free guide specifically for turning existing content into a book at pageandpodium.com/guide.
Method #3: Use a Problem-Cause-Solution Outline
The third method is for persuasive nonfiction.
This can work especially well for political books, advocacy books, prescriptive nonfiction, leadership books, and other projects where you want the reader to see a problem differently and ultimately do something about it.
There are many possible persuasive structures. You can get quite complex with rhetorical sequences and argument design.
But one of my favorites is very easy to wrap your head around:
Problem → Cause → Solution
The first section establishes the problem.
The second digs underneath the surface to explain why that problem exists.
The third presents the solution.
Simple enough.
But there is one part I really do not want you to skip.
The cause is the heart of this structure
I sometimes see writers jump straight from problem to solution.
We have a problem. Here is how to fix it.
But the cause section is often what makes the argument convincing.
Most of us already have some understanding of the problems we encounter. We also tend to default to the most obvious surface-level solutions.
When you devote a section of your book to explaining why the problem exists, you have an opportunity to change the reader’s understanding of the problem itself.
And once they understand the cause the way you do, your solution becomes much more logical.
That is where your expertise is doing a tremendous amount of work.
You are telling the reader: the thing you thought was causing this problem is not quite right. Here is what is actually happening underneath it. Now that we understand that, here is what we can do.
That makes for an extremely cohesive persuasive book.
You can then divide each major section into several chapters. Maybe you have three or four chapters establishing the problem, another three or four unpacking its causes, and several more walking readers through the solution.
You do not need exactly three chapters, and I would not recommend writing a three-chapter book. Somewhere around 10–20 chapters overall is often much more workable.
What matters is that every chapter has a job.
That is really the point of every method in this article.
How to Outline a Nonfiction Book: Choose the Structure Your Material Needs
There is no prize for using the fanciest possible outline.
If your book is fundamentally a story, build the narrative arc.
If your book needs to organize years of existing ideas, gather those ideas and create meaningful topical clusters.
If your book needs to persuade someone to see a problem differently or take action, problem-cause-solution may give you exactly the framework you need.
The important thing is that you make a plan.
Then trust it long enough to write the book.
Your outline may change. In fact, it probably will. New ideas will come up. A chapter may need to move. Something that seemed essential during development may turn out not to belong.
That does not mean outlining failed.
A useful outline gives you enough structure that you can make those changes intentionally rather than getting lost every time the book evolves.
That is why I think learning how to outline a nonfiction book is one of the best investments you can make before drafting. You are giving yourself a structure for the reader and a writing plan for yourself.
If you are especially resistant to outlining because you are worried it will make the writing rigid or formulaic, read Do You Really Need to Outline Your Memoir? or Top 5 Tips for Outlining Your Memoir. Both get into the difference between using an outline as a scaffold and treating one as an inflexible set of rules.
And if you have already built your outline and want another set of eyes before you start writing, Page & Podium offers an Outline Review. We review your complete outline and send you a custom video response identifying places where the structure could be stronger, spots that may cause problems during drafting, and larger issues that could affect readers or publishing later.
You can learn more at pageandpodium.com/outline.
Because once you have a solid plan, the next question is no longer, How on earth am I going to write an entire book?
It is much smaller:
What do I need to write today?
And that is a far easier question to answer.
