How to Outline Your Book (A Simple Visual Method for Writers)

If plotting feels like too heavy an investment, and pantsing often keeps you stuck, a good approach that can help you make progress on your book is loose outlining. A loose outline is like a plot, only that it doesn’t need to be particularly detailed or even complete; it can be a general idea of the main events or just the next part of the book you’re about to write.

Having a plan (even a loosely defined one) is a great way of ensuring that you know where your story is going, reminding yourself of your overall objective as a writer and what you’re trying to tell your readers.

But outlining can be a daunting task too—it can be too detailed and rigid. What’s more, keeping an outline as a chunk of text can be difficult to work with. So, if you’re struggling to outline your novel, keep your ideas organized, or are not sure how to get started, this method can help.

If you’ve been following along, you might have noticed that I like borrowing principles from the world of software development and applying them to writing (like I did here, where I showed you how to apply the Agile approach to writing to get unstuck).

And today I want to introduce a new practice that I picked up while working as a business analyst on software implementation projects—the process map. This approach can help you plan your plot and prevent you from getting stuck while writing.

What is a Process Map in Writing

When figuring out what to write about, we ask questions to identify the overall thread of the book and the main events and obstacles in our characters’ way. In other words, what needs to happen in the novel we’re writing.

But asking questions and making notes can result in a chunk of information that’s difficult to follow and refer to.

One solution to this problem is creating a process flow—it’s a visual sequence of events with a beginning and end, and potentially different paths, players, and outcomes. It’s the way story events flow, and how different players (or characters) interact and cross paths. A process map is a visual way to outline your story and organize key events.

To create a process map, you’ll need to write down the main events of the book (or even just a chapter)/ A simple map would be: hero woke up -> hero discovered they turned into a bear at night -> hero goes to work as a bear and chaos ensues.

How to Create A Process Map for Your Story

In a process map, each step along the way will be represented in its own box, with arrows linking the boxes and directing the flow of events. One of the simplest ways to think of it would be using sticky notes.

Grab some sticky notes and list down each event in your book on one—think main events only and steer away from unnecessary details. Once you’re done, organize the notes in the right order.

The end result can look like:

[little goblin girl lost her family in the great goblin war] -> [goblin girl swears to end the goblin wars] ->  [goblin girl grows to become queen] -> [queen of the goblins brings peace to the goblin tribes] -> [goblin queen becomes corrupted with power and starts war on the neighboring gnomes and becomes a tragic character, stuck in eternal war lust].

This can be captured as sticky notes on a board or on the screen. There are many free process flow tools online that you can use as well.

How a Process Map Helps You Outline a Novel

Slicing your novel apart and organizing it in separate boxes helps you evaluate the events that make up your story.

When building a flow, you can ask yourself if each event is placed in the right spot for it, how it affects others, and if it even needs to be there. If an event suddenly seems out of place, it can be reorganized to appear in a different point in the story, or replaced by another without necessarily affecting the rest of the flow.

But a process map doesn’t only help you figure out the order of events, it also helps ensure you’re spending time on the right things.

Each phase in the story you’re writing needs to make sense and set off other events that follow. Organizing your main events in this way helps you visually ensure that each event is important to the story arc and happens at the right time to set the following events in motion.

Managing Multiple POV’s in a Story with a Process Flow

In the goblin queen’s example, we used a simple flow with one line that goes from beginning to end, but the hero’s journey can be more complex or even plural.

You can create a flow that will be more complex and include a few lines that run in parallel, intersecting at some point or points.

If there are characters who at some point go on separate quests, you can create different lines for each to see how events run in parallel, affect each character, and where they meet. Or, if your characters start off in different points only to be brought together by forces greater than their own, you could have different starting points that eventually merge into one.

This view of different characters and the events that lead to them can help you organize different timelines and keep an eye on what happens when.

How to Use a Process Map for Story Decisions

If you’re not sure about what a character should do in some event, you can add a decision point, like “Does the goblin queen fall in love with an orphaned gnome and end the war, or does she close her heart and keep fighting?”

In this example, you’d use one note for a question (you can use a different color or turn it into a shape to make it stand out. Each potential decision would result in its own sequence of events that flows from the decision point. This sort of view can make it easier for you to see where each decision would lead and eventually decide on the best course of events for your book.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re contemplating a new novel and sketching out ideas, stuck in the middle of writing, or want to ensure that your story is still flowing in the right direction, creating a process map can help you remain organized and keep an eagle-eye view of the most important events in your story.

The process map isn’t a final, one-time process that you need to undergo. It’s a constantly evolving tool that should always be reevaluated and changed when it needs to. This map acts as a skeleton for your story and helps you zoom out when needed.

When creating a process map, stick to the following:

1. Keep it high level (only main events)

2. Keep each event in its separate box

3. Create it so that you can move boxes around (sticky notes or boxes on a PowerPoint presentation work great for that)

Process mapping is one of the tools I use in my quick guide on how to finish writing a book if you’ve never succeeded in doing so before, and it’s a method I use quite a lot (usually when just thinking one chapter at a time).

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