When you picture an outline, you might harken back to school days and shiver at the thought of all those Roman numerals and nit-picky formatting requirements. Many people associate outlines with stifled creativity or cookie-cutter essays. But outlining a long work like a memoir doesn’t take away your creative freedom, but rather it gives you a plan so you can see your memoir through to the end with confidence. Watch the video or read on below for tips on outlining your memoir in a way that won’t give you high school flashbacks.
Sometimes when you don’t know how to start, it can stall your dreams for months, even years. We have helped so many writers not only get started but see the project through the very end! We have created a great free resource to help you make a plan to finally tell the story that lives in your heart. Download the free Memoir Method Checklist today to get started.
Why outline?
There is a reason why we’ve chosen to make outlining such a central part of our Memoir Method program. So often authors come to us with part of a draft, a few great but disconnected chapters, or even years of journals, and they are stuck in trying to move forward. Authors will often feel like they can just start writing and it will all come together, but when they have enough to step back and look at the big picture, they discover it’s not really coming together on its own.
Outlining your memoir is what we recommend to slow down so you can speed up. It’s not a quick process–in fact it may take 1-3 months to complete your outline, which some authors find frustrating because they just want to dive in. But when you have a plan for your whole book, you’re much, much less likely to get stuck with that partial project.
The outline of your book ensures that the whole book as a clear and coherent shape to it. Readers want this–even in memoir. It’s takes 5-10 months to write a book–and that’s if you don’t get stuck or bogged down without a plan–but it only takes 5-10 hours to read. Readers want to be able to take in book and love it for both the trees and the forest.
Secondly, because a book takes so long to come together, it’s a marathon effort. Hopefully you’ve set aside a set time each week to get your writing done, but when you get into week 10, 11, 12, that writing time feels shorter and shorter. When you have an outline, you can sit down with a clear idea of what that day’s writing task is. That makes sticking to it through to the end so much easier.
Tip #1- Choose your structure
You want to outline your book so it has a coherent shape, but what does it mean for a book to have a coherent shape and how do you mold it?
Stories all have an inherent structure to how they pull the reader through to the end. All structures share the same general shape of beginning, rising action, climax, and ending. Different ways of planning and looking at structure break it down into various parts with different number of milestones along the way. We’ve discussed some of the different approaches to structure before. What fascinates me about story structure is that they are like different maps of the same place. Some may show hills and valleys while others show political lines or resources–but if you lay them all on top of one another, they will line up.
When we developed the Memoir Method, we didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel, but to draw a version of the map that would be most useful to first-time memoir authors, to help ensure their stories have a clear structure without being too inflexible to allow for creativity and for it to apply to your actual life story. With our method, you divide your book into four “quadrants,” each ending with a kind of milestone. These milestones help pull the reader through and ensure that shape–beginning, rising action, climax, and ending–keeps the book as a cohesive story.
Tip # 2- Balance the specific plan with wiggle room
Many writers who are hesitant about outlines are really resistant to being put in a box. They don’t want to force their story into exacting formula–but this is not what outlining your memoir should feel like!
Your want your outline to give you a clear plan, but you don’t want to suck the fun out of it. You want your outline to show you the shape, but you’re still going to have plenty of room to play, explore, and discover things about your story along the way. So how do you strike this balance?
Generally speaking, having a chapter summary of about 150-200 words for each chapter (usually around 20 chapters) gives you a pretty solid outline. Short summaries also ensure that you’re sticking to the big high-level points and not getting stuck in the details.
Knowing when you’re done with your outline and ready to draft depends a lot on you and your comfort level, but there is a particular vibe I want you to aim for. Imagine you’re planning a vacation abroad to a place you’ve never been to before. You definitely want to plan things out, right? You want to know where you’re going to stay, the major things you want to see, things that need to be booked in advance, and think a bit through your logistics of how you will get to place to place.
But you don’t want to overplan. If you have a to-the-minute itinerary, then it’s not going to feel like a vacation anymore. When your outline feels like a well-planned vacation with plenty of free time to explore each location, then you’re ready to go.
Tip #3- Use a plain voice and third person
Your outine is not just a truncated form of your book in the same way that a map is not the place itself.
When outlining your memoir, you want to take an objective, arm’s-length view of your story. A great way to ensure you’re getting this objective look is allowing yourself to write in a very plain, no-frills voice and approach. Metaphors, imagery, and evocative description come later.
We also recommend writing your book in the third person. This can feel odd at first because it’s your life story and our brains are wired to think in first person about ourselves. Writing in third allows you to take yet another step back to give you a real and honest look at what stories and elements belong in the book, and which don’t. Every part of your life matters to you. When we take a step back and allow ourselves to think of ourselves as a character in a book, we can see what parts of our life belong to the book a bit more objectively.
Tip #4- Get feedback
When you have a finished outline with a clear chapter summary for each planned chapter, it’s a great point in the process to get some feedback. We’ve written before on how to get effective feedback. Because your outline is written in plain language, this is a good chance to be sure your big-picture points are coming across the way you want them to and that everything logically follows from one chapter to the next. Whether it’s a friend or professional (we do offer outline reviews from Page & Podium!), having a second set of eyes at this stage is invaluble.
Tip #5-Don’t Panic
The only sure thing about plans is that they never go 100% to plan. Same goes for outlines–I’ve never known a project that didn’t need adjustment to the outline at some point along the way. That’s okay!
Think back to the vacation metaphor. Perhaps you’ve made reservations at a restuarant, but when you get there, it’s completely empty and smells bad. Seriously, it stinks. Or perhaps you’ve discovered–fifteen minutes before your train is due to leave–that there are actually two stations in Dublin and you’re at the wrong one. Or perhaps you drove on the left side of the road a little too hard and blew both left tires of your rental car. The whole trip isn’t ruined, you just have to do some trouble shooting and rethinking until you’re back on track.
Outlining your memoir means that when these things happen, when the story throws up an obstacle that you didn’t see coming, then you can step back again and look at the whole picture again. Maybe the original plan of getting from A to B isn’t working, but you know that B is still there. You know where you’re going, so when you need to make changes to which stories you’re going to include, where the flashbacks go, or when you introduce a sub-theme, you can see how it’s going to fit into that big picture.
Outlining your memoir isn’t about putting your stories in a box or formula. It’s about drawing a map so you don’t get lost among the trees.
Happy Writing!
