How to Outline a Book: My Actual Process for Fiction and Nonfiction

How do you outline a book?

The outlining debate in writing circles generates more heat than light. Plotters plan every scene before drafting. Pantsers discover the story as they write. Both approaches produce successful books. Both produce failures. The method matters less than whether you end up with a structure that holds. For more, see point of view in fiction.

I don’t usually outline first. I get an idea, I write the first chapter, and only then do I outline. After that I write whatever chapter strikes my fancy, in any order, and connect them together as the book fills in. I call it the ink blot method. After dozens of novels and 54+ ghostwritten books, it’s still how I write my own fiction, and nonfiction for clients gets a completely different process. For more, see historical accuracy in fiction.

The tribal fighting over outlining drives me up the wall.

Writers defend their method like it’s a team jersey, and meanwhile the book they’re supposed to be writing sits unfinished. When I look at anyone’s process, I care about one thing: does it get a book to the end with its structure intact? Everything I describe here passes that test for me, and none of it is sacred.

Watch: Brandon Sanderson's 9 Step Outlining Method, Yarn Ray

What is the ink blot method of writing a novel?

It starts with an idea and a first chapter. No outline yet, no character sheets, no plan beyond the idea itself. I write chapter one and see what I’ve got. Then I outline.

The outline is short: chapter headers for the whole book, each one telling me what that chapter is generally about. I don’t do scene breakdowns, and I don’t map character arcs to page numbers.

Then the fun starts. I don’t write Chapter 2 next. I write whatever chapter strikes my fancy that day, then another, then another, and connect them together as they pile up. Characters do unexpected things. Plot threads appear from nowhere. Scenes I planned become irrelevant while scenes I never imagined become essential. The chapter headers keep all those pieces pointed at the same book, so the manuscript doesn’t wander into a dead end.

The name comes from how the book grows. Picture drops of ink on paper, each one spreading until it runs into the next. My drops are the major plot points, five of them or as many as ten, and I write outward from each one until the chapters meet. It works very well for me, and it’s how I write all my fiction now.

In the AI-Enhanced Novel Handbook, I describe this as “pantsing with purpose.” My outlines capture major structural beats without locking in details. First act ends around here with this general situation. Midpoint involves this shift. Climax resolves this central tension. Everything else emerges through writing.

The advice I think is most wrong in this whole area is “don’t use AI.” I use it every day as a digital assistant, for transcripts, summaries and a first-pass outline I can argue with, and I do the writing myself. A writer who works that way can probably get books out four or five times faster, and one who refuses on principle can’t compete with the authors who use it.

Why write novel chapters out of order?

Most novels that fall apart do so in the middle. The opening has natural momentum because you’re establishing and intriguing. The ending has natural momentum because you’re resolving and concluding. The middle generates no momentum on its own. That’s where manuscripts sag, wander, pad with filler, and lose their readers.

Writing out of order goes straight at that problem.

I never have to slog through the middle from front to back, because I’m always writing the chapter I want to write that day. When I connect the chapters afterward, the gaps and the drifting scenes show up plainly, and I cut or redirect them. I think a saggy middle kills more promising novels than anything else, and it’s the most preventable failure there is.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novels out of order decades before anybody called it a method.

He drafted in pencil on index cards, and he didn’t work from the first page to the last. In his 1967 interview with The Paris Review, he told Herbert Gold, “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose.” His last novel, The Original of Laura, was left unfinished as 138 of those cards.

Nabokov knew the shape of the whole puzzle before he filled in a single square, and that’s the half people forget when they copy his habit. The cards gave him freedom about order, and the pattern kept the book in one piece.

I think my page of chapter headers does the same job. Without it I’d be writing scenes that never add up to a novel.

Out of order doesn’t mean out of control. Shield of Ashes demanded chronological progression, seven days of nuclear war unfolding in sequence, and the reader gets those days in order no matter which chapter I wrote first. The outline holds the sequence. The drafting can go wherever it wants.

What does a novel outline look like?

My fiction outlines are short. For a 25-chapter novel, the outline might be a single page of chapter headers:

Chapter 1: The dodgeball video goes viral. Chapter 2: The group chat. Chapter 3: School gets worse. Chapter 4: Pulled into the internet. Chapter 5: Orientation to the digital world. And so on through Chapter 25.

That’s it. No paragraph descriptions. No dialogue notes. No subplot tracking at this stage. Just enough structure to know the general shape of the book.

The exception is subplots. When a novel has multiple storylines that need to intersect, I plan those intersections in advance. Pantsing works for main plots. Discovery writing finds the story’s spine organically. But subplots multiply and tangle if you don’t track them.

A character’s rivalry at work affects another character’s relationship. That creates tension in a third character’s family. Those connections need planning or they become snarled messes that can’t be resolved satisfyingly.

How is outlining nonfiction different from fiction?

Ghostwriting a nonfiction business book requires a more detailed outline than fiction, because the structure serves a different purpose.

A fiction outline guides a story toward its ending. A nonfiction outline organizes an argument, and when the argument arrives out of order, readers stop trusting the author. I think a sloppy nonfiction outline does more damage than a sloppy novel outline, because the person who pays for it is the expert whose name is on the cover.

For ghostwritten books, the outline emerges from the client interviews. After several hours of conversation, I have a picture of what the client knows, what their audience needs, and what the book’s core argument is. The outline organizes that material into a sequence that builds the reader’s understanding chapter by chapter.

For a client’s book I start by collecting every document the client wrote. I’m not interested in what other people wrote, and I treat the client’s own writing as vetted. All of it goes into one project with the interview summaries, and AI gives me several outlines from that same material, one by theme and one by chronology. The one organized by competitor is pretty interesting. For an 80,000-word book they usually come out at 14 to 16 chapters.

A typical nonfiction outline includes chapter titles, a one-paragraph description of each chapter’s content, and the main points or stories that belong in each chapter. This is more detailed than my fiction outlines because the client needs to approve the structure before I start writing. The outline is where we align on what the book covers, what order it covers it in, and what gets emphasized. Normally I write an outline and leave it at that, but if your mind works differently, we can organize it another way. One of my early clients flew down here and we covered the hotel-room wall with sticky notes, and I haven’t done it since, but it was fun.

The outline also works as a project management tool. Clients want to know what they’re paying for before the drafting starts. Current ghostwriting pricing is on the ghostwriting page. They need to see the architecture before I build the house. The outline gives them that visibility and gives me a clear map for drafting. But even in nonfiction, the outline stays flexible. Client interviews reveal new material throughout the writing process. A story the client tells in month three might restructure an entire section. The outline accommodates that evolution instead of resisting it.

Nonfiction also gets written in a different order. A novel can grow from scattered drops of ink, but an argument has to arrive in logical order, so I write nonfiction front to back, the same way the reader will read it.

Should You Be a Pantser or a Plotter?

Writers waste enormous energy arguing about whether plotting or pantsing is the correct approach. The answer is whatever produces finished manuscripts that work.

Some writers need detailed outlines to feel secure. They plan every scene before drafting. They know exactly what happens in Chapter 17 before writing Chapter 1. That security lets them write with confidence instead of anxiety. Other writers feel strangled by detailed outlines. The discovery of what happens next makes writing enjoyable for them. If they know everything in advance, the drafting feels like transcription instead of creation. I’m in the second camp, with guardrails. A first chapter and a page of chapter headers give me just enough structure to keep the book from collapsing, and writing the chapters in whatever order grabs me keeps the discovery that makes writing fun.

The bigger danger is outline perfectionism: spending months creating elaborate planning documents, detailed character backgrounds, and complete world-building materials while avoiding the messy uncertainty of actual writing.

That preparation feels productive while functioning as sophisticated procrastination. A talented writer who spends a year on a story bible and never writes chapter one is fooling themselves. At some point, you have to write the book.

When Do Book Outlines Fail?

Outlines fail when writers treat them as contracts. If your outline says the protagonist does X in Chapter 12 but the character has evolved in a direction that makes X feel forced, fix the outline and leave the character alone. The outline exists to serve the story, and a writer who bends a living character to match a plan made months earlier is choosing paperwork over the book.

I’ve abandoned outlines mid-draft when the story found a better path, and I’ve never regretted it. The outline did its job: it got me started, gave me direction, and then got out of the way when the story outgrew it.

Outlines also fail when they’re too detailed. A 20-page outline for a 50,000-word book can feel like the book has already been written. The drafting becomes mechanical instead of creative. For fiction especially, leaving room for surprise keeps the writing alive.

And outlines fail when they don’t exist at all. Pure pantsing with no structural awareness produces manuscripts that wander, repeat, contradict themselves, and collapse in the middle. You need some kind of spine. How detailed that spine is depends on your process, but it needs to exist.

A Practical Starting Point

If you’ve never outlined before, start with three things. What happens at the beginning, what happens at the end, and what changes in the middle. That’s enough structure to write a novel. Everything else is refinement.

On a client’s book I work backwards from the end. If we’re going to the Grand Canyon, I need to know that before I plan the trip. So the first question is what the reader should feel when they finish the book. Angry? Happy? Should they think they can do this, or that everything’s hopeless? We aim the book at that feeling, then do the same for the end of every single chapter. After the feeling, I ask what the reader should do and then what they should learn.

If you’ve been outlining extensively and your books still don’t work, try outlining less. Write the first chapter, sketch the chapter headers, and then write whichever chapter you’re itching to write. Let the story surprise you. You might find that the structure you couldn’t plan reveals itself through the writing.

A finished book with architecture that holds is the goal, and however you get there is the right method for you. A writer who abandons a good story because someone in a writing group told them their process was wrong has been robbed. Ignore that person and finish the book. For full guidance on novel structure, pacing, and the relationship between plotting and discovery, see the AI-Enhanced Novel Handbook. For plot-specific architecture, see the AI-Enhanced Plot Handbook. For managing multi-book story arcs, see the AI-Enhanced Story Arcs Handbook.

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