A story outline will help you navigate through your story more easily during your first draft, and help you flesh out details during revision. Having an outline is the most important thing you could have. Diving straight into it with no plan is basically the worst thing you could do.
Story outlines can be simple. Just brief descriptions of the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. You don't have to add detail if you don't want, but they will certainly come in handy.
I made the mistake of diving into my first book with no plan. And when I rewrote it, I made the plan for it super vague. As a result, I feel my book is super sloppy, and a lot of things didn't happen when they should have. Characters died too close to the end of the book, which gives no time to feel sad for them. The climax is all over the place and way to drawn out which makes the falling action really just the conclusion. The denouement is really just the falling action, and it doesn't make sense. But I can't do anything to fix it.
What I do now is write a very brief synopsis of what I want to happen in the book. Make sure to include individual character goals, though most should hopefully share the same goal.
After the synopsis, I write another but specifically for the exposition, and others for the falling action, climax, and so on. The exposition can simply be summarized as "character introductions" or "End of Christmas break". But the rest should have a bit more detail (with the exception of the denouement).
And then I go into further detail. I usually separate them into columns/pointers. For example (not one of my actual stories)
Exposition: character introduction
A. Talk of alien activity reaches the MC's lab.
1. Aliens are coming to earth
2. MC must interfere with the alien comms.
-eventually he finds that the aliens coming is inevitable
-friend translates code from the aliens
3. The lab goes into panic
Rising action:
A. MC figures out the date the aliens will arrive.
1. Smart friend is still translating code.
-the code has a block
-friend struggles as the code gets more complicated
B. They lose the code
1. Smart friend blames MC
-they argue
2. They abandon each other
C. MC is alone and finds the space ship falling from the sky
1. He tries collecting data from the ship computers but isn't close enough
2. The ship crashes
-MC investigates the crash and finds the aliens are dead.
-He looks around to figure out why they didn't save themselves
D. Smart friend appears at the crash site
Climax: smart friend is evil
And then it would continue obviously. Mine aren't that short. They usually take up a couple pages in my documents, and are so long I've had to color code them to find specific details I'm looking for. I make them so flushed out so that I don't run into the same mistake I made with my first book, and I'm sharing this with you so you can do the same. Planning how you'll navigate and express your story is critical if you don't want it to die.
This is very brief but I hope it was helpful! Leave any questions or anything you'd like to add in the comments!
ŞİMDİ OKUDUĞUN
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