Creating Effective Outlines for Your Novel

1. Class Introduction: Hi, welcome to Creating Effective Outlines. This course will give you the steps you need to plot and outline your story, whether it's a full length novel or an novella. Just whatever you might need to get into creating an outline that helps you get through the drafting process a lot faster. What we don't really think about sometimes when we start drafting a novel is the big picture overall. What is the story going to be about and the very end of the story. A lot of people just have scenes in their head or ideas, and they want to rush to write them down. But then we get tangled in the web, the narrative, and we start asking ourselves, okay, where do we go from here? How do I implement what I'm thinking onto the page? And how do I create a compelling story? This class is going to serve to help you with that. Just to give a little introduction of who I am, my name is Madison Diaz. I write romance, specifically contemporary romance. I'm also an avid reader of all subgenres in romance. Whenever I'm coming into this class, my expertise is romance. But you can apply what we learn here into different story elements. I just want to give that upfront. That is my expertise. That's my experience. That is what my passion is. A lot of the examples I might give might pertain to romance. But I will try to cover other types of genres and maybe where the differences may lie between those. One major element to my genre is characterization and a focus on relationships. That's the whole point of romance, right? That will be a little bit more of. What I'll focus on too, is helping with characterization, like implementing the subplots that we get from side characters and different things that come in to create overall compelling story. Um, I'm going to provide you with an outline template and by the end of the class you will have completed the outline. That's the whole point of the class. You can change the outline to what fits your genre, what fits what you need. That's fine. I'm just giving you the bare bones of what I look at whenever I'm outlining a book. I've ghost written over ten novels. That is my day job. That's what I do. I draft novels for different clients and they take it and do what they wish with it. It's more of a way for me to continue to practice my craft, continue to get better at outlining and writing that whenever I am back to self publishing on a more regular schedule, I have this experience from what I've learned I want to share with you guys. This class is for writers who feel stuck. You don't know where to go next, you might not even know where to start. The organization is what's possibly holding you back. And that's going to be my job to teach you how to create an outline that's effective for you. We'll go over the different elements of what makes a story. We'll go over the concept versus an idea. We'll go over character development, theme, voice, story, structure, and scene execution. Some of these might take a little bit more time than others, but we're going to go over them all throughout this course. And it'll give you the beginning blocks of how to outline your own story and make it really effective. It really helps you with drafting later and making sure you hit all subplots and create a really compelling outline. 2. Concept: The first thing we'll go over today is concept. This is the first step of what makes the story, these different elements basically come together to create a compelling story that gets readers to go all the way to the end. Through this course, I will combine stuff that I've learned through application. Literally going out and writing books from what I learned in my MFA journey to get my creative writing degree. Then also, I use a lot from a book called Story Engineering by Larry Brooks. I've done my own thing with it, but I just wanted to give him a little bit of a shout out, because when I read his book, I really felt like I had the beginning blocks of how to start conceptualizing, writing a story and making an outline that works. If you want to read more, he has his own things that he does. Go ahead and look him up. Look up the book, I would say read it in detail. And you'll get a little bit more of these concepts. And I'm going over, but for this class itself, these are the different elements of story that I'm going to be breaking down for you. Let's start with concept. A concept takes an idea and evolves it into something applicable or possible. Like what if we took this idea and apply this action or event to it? What would happen? What would we have? Your concept doesn't have to be completely original, but what aspects do you bring to the idea that asks a specific question? What would happen in these instances? How would that play out? Now you've been able to take an idea and turn it into a concept. A lot of people do get hung up on ideas, or they'll have a specific scene in their head that they want to write down. And then they're like, okay, well, how does the story come out of this? Because that's not enough to make a story. Having just the beginning portion of something does not necessarily give you a full concept. Something we can do whenever we're trying to figure out like the concept of our story, if you're starting from a scene or an idea is, how do we broaden that a little bit? Whenever we're looking at, let's say I'll use an example of a romance. Whenever we're taking a story, it's already been told 1 million times. Those of you who also read romance, the Persephone and death, Persephone and Hades story has been told so many times. It gets reput into new books and new romances and people enjoy it. How we're able to look at that concept. Okay, let's take this story that people already know. But then what do I add to it? How do I make it something that's interesting for my readers? That's whenever you get this concept of like, let's take something that's already known and turn it into something that is different. I want you to look at the outline I have provided for you. And you can see at the top I put tropes. You can delete that. If that's not something you want, you can put something else there that's a little more up to your speed of how you want to outline your stories. But I put tropes here because for a lot of us, whenever we are writing something that's very genre focused, it's like what tropes are we looking at? If you are writing to your genre, what tropes do you want to use? You can make a list of the different genres you're trying to implement here. If you're doing a romance, you would do like maybe a gap. Billionaire. I don't like billionaire stories. But if you're doing something like that, teacher, something like that, then you would be able to go into more detail about how it would pertain to your story. And then you start conceptualizing your original idea. Turning it into something that is much more concrete. Something that you can turn into a bigger story and not just have it be just one scene or one idea that needs further contemplation. 3. Characterization: Now that we've covered concept, let's move on to the next portion of the story, which is character. Characters are an essential part of the story. Every story has characters, whether they're liable, unlikable, main character side characters, protagonist, antagonist, whatever. When developing these characters, it's essential to include certain elements that make them well rounded. Intriguing. You don't have to have perfect characters, like I said. They don't even have to be liable. They can be inconsistent, whatever it is, but it has to make sense to the reader of why they're behaving this way. You can have a completely inconsistent character, but why are they that way? The reader needs to know in order to continue the story. If they hate your character, they might even read it just because they want to see bad things happen to your character. It really just depends. Or they want to see them have some big story arc where they become a different person and they have their redemption. Whatever keeps the reader going, but you just have to make the character compelling enough to continue with the story and grow interested in how it'll play out. I have some things here to keep in mind for whenever you're developing your characters. You can think of surface attributes and their personality backstory, their overall character, arc, decisions, actions and behaviors, inner demons and conflicts, goals and motivation and worldview. Another thing to consider when developing characters, as I know, they say that each character needs to have a goal. I've heard that so many times in my craft, studying in life, I will say that I don't think that's necessarily true. I think side characters don't necessarily need some complex goal. You could sometimes just have a side character that is really one sided. But they do have to serve a purpose of some sort. If the purpose is to get the main character a drink from the bar or something, that's fine. That's a really small goal to have. But you don't need to develop an entire back story for this character that you're only going to mention. Maybe once. I feel like I got caught up on that a lot. This is more of like a tip for beginners because I feel like I got caught up a lot on that when I first started writing. And you don't need all of that information for side characters. It's more of the main characters or people who really have their moment to shine in your story that need a little bit more of that further development. Here's some characterization tips. In the outline I gave you, you can see that I have MMC, FMC. That's male main character. Female main character. That's just for basic like my romance stories, I usually write, I'm trying not to write super heteronormative stories, but I do lots of ideas that are male and female, man and woman getting together. You can add more to this if you have an ensemble, you can delete it if you only want to focus on one story. But I gave you the basics of just like having two characters, and then a little subsection for other characters. You can see that next to MMC or FMC, I'll usually put their name and age. I don't really need to put gender because that already specifies it, but just that basic stuff. The next is general history. Where do they come from? How do they get to this point? You can include things that you never mentioned in the book. Um, things that don't have anything to even do with the actual narrative. It's just something that you know about the character and if it does come up, you can inserted in there. But if it doesn't then it does. Your character lived a whole life before you started the story. And they will continue to live the imaginary fictional life after you finish the story. Physical appearance, just a short description. You don't need to go crazy. Just things that you know that you're going to mention multiple times or something that's very important to like who they are. You don't have to go crazy with the physical appearance. But something I do because of romance is I usually at least write their eye color and their hair color. Those are two usually important things I'll maybe do. Their stature, like this person's small, this person's tall, whatever, don't go into deep detail about they look specifically like this because once you have the person in your mind, you can write from there. I also have personality traits in there. You can take from a book if you need a little bit more personality traits, But if you have some in mind, just jot them down like this person is driven, This person cares about their family. This is very picky, this person is very stubborn. Whatever it is, the next would be the goal is something that they're trying to accomplish within the novel. Get this, do they not get this? Is it unreachable? Possible. It becomes up to you of like what their overall goal is. Usually in a romance, I would make it the external goal is more of what are they trying to achieve outside of the relationship. Then the internal conflict is what stops them from fully engaging in this relationship. In other types of stories, what's the internal conflict that is stopping them from achieving their goals? What's stopping them from moving forward? How do they doubt themselves, whatever it may be? That's where the internal conflict comes in. And that starts to become the beginning of building blocks on how to embrace the later challenges in the book. 4. Theme: After talking about characterization a little bit, now we're going to move on to theme, this is one of those more broad abstract ideas of writing that becomes a part of how is writing art basically, how do we use our creativity to implement these stories that create something that people want to know about. What we have here is theme. We have our concept, we have our characters. The theme would be like, what lessons are you trying to teach your characters about life? What goes right or wrong for your character? And what do they learn from it? These questions are the important thing of giving yourself, what are they saying? What is this book saying? What's the point of this book? Right. Some people write comfort stories where nothing really does happen. But then isn't there still a general theme at that point? The general theme would be, life is worth enjoying. What I mean, it really just becomes what type of message do you want the reader to receive from your novel? We are the designers of our stories. Characters go through trials and tribulations, we put them through, your theme must encapsulate how a person could interpret these events and draw a similar conclusion about their own life. That's usually those stories that really touch our hearts or scare the crap out of us. A for writer, whatever it is that your goal is in writing, what do the characters go through? What are the decisions they make? And how do they change by the end of the book? These are the important elements to think about when thinking about theme. Because what do you want the reader to take away? How is this going to impact their life in some way? That's more something to think about whenever you're thinking about theme. I know it's a very broad idea of something. Theme is a little hard is voice whenever we do get to that aspect of the course. But I just want you to think about like what lessons are you teaching the reader and what lessons are the characters going through? What lesson have you learned that you know that you can implement in a way where it makes sense that the character would also feel this way. Also go through these things. Those are all important things to think about when you're thinking about theme. 5. The Setup: Now that we've learned a little bit more about the initial aspects that you need to make a story, we'll move on to story structure because that I feel like is one of the most important parts of creating a story. You have all the beginning blocks. But then how do we create structure and turn this into something that makes sense and that is cohesive and has good pacing. All the things that writers really want. This is going to be the bulk of this course, is this lesson right here. Story structure is the sequence of events that tells the reader what happened. How one tells a story does not need to be linear. But it does need to have some structure to keep readers invested until the end. If your reader finds themselves confused and not interested in reading for answers or they've given up, hope that answers will reveal themselves, then they are less likely to continue to finish the book. Story structure is essential to writing a book someone would care to complete. There are a few elements of story structure. I've expanded upon this based on how I approach story writing. And from what I've read right initially, we have the set up. The set up is the first 20.25%, of your book. Your job as the writer is to provide your readers with everything they need to know to become invested in your characters and story. Some crucial things to think about in the set up of your story is establishing the status quo. If you look at the outline I gave you, the status quo is who the characters are at the start of the story. What do they want, right? Whenever you start developing the outline here, you can put in the status quo. And so just experience this, this is what they're doing. They've been this their whole life, but they're recently fired, whatever it is. Then the next aspect is the hook that is also part of the set up. The hook happens very quickly in the book because it gives the reader a reason to continue to read. What will hook your reader to continue past the start of your story? Some readers are more giving than others. Some will give your book a little bit more time to hook them. Others want to be hooked right away. Really just used to your discretion. If it's difficult to hook the reader from the moment they open the book. Just make sure it happens pretty soon. I would say within the first chapter, have something going on that really keeps them reading and wanting to continue. The sooner the better. If you have a lot of backstory that you need to establish at the beginning, I would suggest a prologue. Otherwise, sprinkle that information in as the reader goes. Try not to make it a dense exposition. At first, it's more of like what is happening, how is the status quo being shaken? That is where your hook comes in. The next part is the inciting incident that can come a little later. That needs to come at least in the first 25% of your story. But it is the thing that happens that springs your character into action. This is what changes their life forever. This is what the story going to be about, or at least the start of what gets them moving onto something else. Some set up tips I have here for you are to hook your readers from the start by giving them a reason to stick around. The hook should land somewhere in the first three to four scenes. If not earlier, introduce your main character by dropping your readers into an average day for them. What would they usually be doing or thinking right before the hook and inciting incident? What does their reaction explain about their character? Convince the audience that what's at stake is incredibly important and worth continuing the story. Those are your goals as a writer when you're setting up your story. Here's some more set the tone by foreshadowing events that are on the way. Your reader shouldn't be completely caught off guard by what happens in the story. There can be some element of surprise, but plot points that appear out of nowhere can make it seem as if the story isn't structured. I absolutely do not like that in books. It gives me the idea, personally, that they did not seek help from beta readers or editors or anything. Some people are very talented at writing. They can write a story just off the top of their head. But whenever you're missing those structural issues that could come from outlining or just ensuring that your story has that structure, that's where it becomes a problem and it becomes obvious that the writer just sat down and just wrote it. You prepare your readers that something is going to change in this character's life and it's going to be big. Now your readers are ready to prepare for whatever you throw their way, as long as it makes sense to the world and your characters. 6. Rising Action and Midpoint: After setting up the story, we move into the next portion which is the response. How does your character respond to what happened at the end of your story Set up, your protagonist is now set into motion trying to entangle the events thrust upon them in the story. Don't immediately try to solve the issues right away. Let your character respond faster and grow into more complicated plot points. But for now, at this stage of the story, they are reacting to the circumstances that led them to this point. Next they head toward what could be considered the story's midpoint. The response is the rising action you've created. Whatever the issue is going to be for the novel, for your then now, how are they responding to that? What are their reactions? What are their initial plans to get to the next point? Those are more of the elements to think about in the response. You can tell in the outline that I put challenge number one. What are they trying to overcome at this beginning point for a romance novel? The beginning is they meet or they have their issue. Whatever it is, the inciting incident happens that thrust them together and they're forced to work together in some way. That initial challenge is working through those first issues we have in dating, like what are our insecurities, what's the thing that kept them apart originally, and then working towards this point of coming together in a romantic relationship. After that, we have number three, the attack. This is where your main character has decided to do something about their circumstances. They are now working to fix what was wrong, whether the conflict is external or internal. For romance, this would mean that the characters are striving to create a strong foundation within their love interest with each other. This is where the training, fighting, infiltrating, or bonding happens. Depending on the overall conflict of your story. This pushes things along and adds momentum for the eventual speed bump. This is considered the midpoint of your outline. 7. Rest of Story Structure: After you've gotten through the training montage or everything is good moment or whatever it is. That was your midpoint of your outline of your novel. Where the characters are implementing what they've learned. And this is like an all as well moment. Or it can be like they're working together on some project or something. Like they're starting to really see results in what they've been working towards at the beginning. Then we move on to expansion. This would be the second plot point of your outline. If you look at the outline template, that's where I put challenge number two. The expansion, whatever fear your character has been working to overcome has intensified at this point. The midpoint was like where things were a little bit more steady, but now they're hitting that road bump that we were talking about. Usually this can be considered a low point in the story. We can include low point as well in this. What is the second challenge? And then how does that lead us to the low point? It doesn't always have to be. Usually in story structure, there's an always lost moment where we worry that the characters won't get what they want. Think of this portion of the story as an expansion on what's already happened. The midpoint gave the readers an immersion into the world and conflict by either offering a break or continuing to heighten the stakes. How have their goals changed so far in the story? And what do they need to overcome by the end? That should be your goal for the challenge number two and low point in your outline and it's considered the second plot point of your story. After that, we have the breakthrough. This is the climax. Everything has led to this moment. Your character has experience conflict, strife, and loss. They are now at a point where they need a breakthrough to overcome what has been lost. What final lessons do they need to learn? No new information needs to be added. At this point, it becomes all about how to start addressing the biggest plot point presented in the story. And try to begin tying up loose ends. Your protagonist must realize or overcome something at this point which changes them significantly. Don't worry so much about subplots. As you're doing your chapter outlines, you do start realizing that you opened up certain subplots for your side characters. And by the end of the story, you have to close them right at the breakthrough moment. You don't really have to do that. It's more about what is the big overarching issue that your character is going through. What is the point of the story that gets addressed? At this point, whatever happens is what changes them for better or worse, at the end of your story. After that, we have the resolution. At this point, your protagonist has changed and knows what they need to do to move forward. This final portion becomes all about tying off all the loose ends of your story. Assess every plot point and subplot presented in your novel and figure out a natural way to end or address them by the end. This is when people make amends or find closure in some way. Make it something that resonates with the reader and helps wrap up the story in a satisfying way. This could be considered the falling action of your novel after the climax. This is the end for a romance novel. They have their big moment where they figure out, actually love that person all along and they've been holding themselves back. Or if it's an external conflict, then like we've worked together to resolve this antagonistic force that's been against us. Now we can come together and have a resolution where things go back to normal. But it's a new normal. It's a normal that you worked for as the writer and as the characters. That's the resolution of the story. That completes the story structure. This is around the time that you would give your story an end. 8. Scenes: Now that we've gotten to the end of structuring our story, it's time to move on to the scenes. Scene execution is critical in a story because it is the ingredients that leads your reader through the various elements presented in your narrative. Scenes can vary in length and goals, but they do need to add information that keeps the story moving forward. Come into each scene with a goal in mind and then implement it. Simple steps to follow would be first set the scene to present the information or conflict that they go through in the scene. And then three, provide foreshadowing or resolution four in on a cliff hanger. If you can give your readers a reason to say one more chapter, right? The reason I'm giving you a few steps is because I think a lot of people do struggle with the scene aspect. You might have a scene in your head, but it would be like a particular moment in the scene, maybe even. But a scene isn't just a moment. You have to set the groundwork, you have to create the setting, things like that. What I do for setting the scene is I usually like to think about maybe a few senses that get activated by the environment. Like where are they? What's happening? When does it smell like? I just use a few. You don't have to go through all of them, but just something to give the reader an idea of what's going on. Especially if it's a continuation from the cliff hanger in the chapter before set the scene again. Because maybe they put the book down and went and did something and now they're coming back. They need that really short reminder, but not too much to where it's overly redundant. What if the person rushed through right into the next chapter, they don't want to relive what they already read. You have to find that balance for yourself of setting the scene and setting the stakes. Then you can present whatever new information in a way that is compelling, that isn't just an info dump, have somebody say something to them, have them experience something. They read something in a book. Whatever it is that gets them to receive that information. Or they go through whatever conflict and then same thing, figure out a way to tell it. Interestingly, don't let yourself get hung up on the drafting part of it. If what you need for yourself as a writer to get it on paper is an info dump, do that. That's fine. Write a bunch of exposition, but the point in editing that later would be to go back and figure out how you can tell it better. Who can be there to give that information to them? What can they overcome in a personal way that gives the same information or deals with the same conflict? Then yes, the information you receive can cause foreshadowing for the story or some type of resolution. But then we have the next portion that's going to happen. I would say yeah, do your best to end on some cliff hang or what gets the person going. I want to find out what happens next. I want to find out what happens next. 9. Foreshadowing: Here's also some foreshadowing tips for you. Foreshadowing provides the reader with information that will prepare them for a critical point in the story. These are subtle hints that ensure your reader isn't blinded by developments in the story. Like I said earlier, it really bothers me when something feels like it came out of left field completely that there was no preparation for. It was like how come this was never an insecurity for the character, how come they never dealt with anything that had to do with this? And then now we're at the third act of the story. And the whole third conflict is about this thing that no one was prepared for. That does not mean you need to spoonpoonfeed readers, but you really do need to give them hints that this thing is going to happen later in the story. Foreshadowing is most important in the first half of your story for sure, because later on you're not giving as much new information. They're experiencing what's already going on. Right? These little drops of information give the reader a road map to follow through the protagonists experiences. From knowing bits of information about the setting or character, readers can anticipate how certain elements might impact the protagonist and their journey, giving them a deeper connection to these plot points. That's what I mean about something coming out of nowhere, then the reader doesn't have a connection to it because it's like, wow, that character never behaved in a way that someone who experienced that would have behaved. It just seems like it comes really out of left field and doesn't really make sense. Make sure that you're providing enough information to where whenever these big plot points do happen, your reader does not feel like it came out of nowhere or that they were not prepared at all. The foreshadowing really gives them a chance to sink into this and be prepared so that whenever something does happen, their character will respond appropriately based on what we know about them, about their past, and any foreshadowing we received before that point. 10. Voice: Okay, we're wrapping up with the final part of this course with voice. Voice is the final element we'll go over for what makes the story. This is the most creative, fun, and sometimes highly frustrating part of writing because this is what cannot be taught. Voice comes from trial and error. Voice comes from writing and writing and writing. This is your brush stroke. This is how you figure out how to write in ways that works for you and your characters. Characters have their own voice that's expressed through the author, but the way you tell stories and present them to your readers is your voice. This part of the process cannot be rushed, It can only be experienced. It can be a bummer for some people who really want to learn how to write better. That's what a lot of people ask. How can I write better? How can I emulate the writers that, that inspire me? The truth is that we can't write exactly like those writers, of course, right? In some ways I do that with ghost writing. I can implement a little bit of what's popular out there and try to emulate that a little bit and use it as inspiration for my writing. But what's my personal voice? How am I shown in my writing? That's what a lot of people struggle with and that's the part that's trial and error. And you continue to write, and write, and write until you get it out. Some voice tips are to ensure your dialogue sounds authentic and real. Read it back. And ask yourself if a person would actually say this. Think about this a little bit too with narration. How is this happening through your characters lens, right? Think of your scenes through the eyes of the narrator. What would they notice and not notice? Is it important to the story? Does it immerse the reader into the narrative? These are things to consider whenever you are looking at voice and trying to work through voice. Also, don't give up your scenes. Read awkwardly, try rewriting them. Ask yourself, what's missing to portray your thoughts in a meaningful way? Another thing I would suggest is read, read, read. What do you like or dislike about what you're reading? What are your goals as a writer and how can that be implemented on page? Those are my tips for voice. Voice is definitely a difficult thing because it's the creative part, like all of this is creative. But the voice is honestly the hardest part because it is how you are expressed through your writing. That's not really something that I can teach you. It's really just something you have to experience and practice. Make writing your craft. Some people are very talented writers out that go, but a lot of other people it's a craft, you're not just a bad writer. A lot of people think they're just a bad writer. It's like you probably just don't have the experience of writing to continue to get better. That's what needs to be thought about whenever approaching voice in your writing. Just implement that as well in your process. 11. Chapter Outlines: This final section here is going to be a little bit more about chapter outlines. I did not make a Powerpoint slide about chapter outlines, but I just want to go over them really briefly with you guys because I feel like it'd be really helpful. Throughout this process, you've been filling out each portion of the story. The status quo, where we start, the hook, inciting incident, their challenge, their midpoint, all the way to the end. Now you can take those scenes that you crafted and plug them into your story. Figure out how long you want your story to be. I usually like my chapter link to be about 2,500 words each. I would say 1500-5 thousand is the standard, I'm pretty sure. Then from there, you can figure out how many chapters you want to have based on how much you want your overall story to be and then how long you want each chapter to be. The status quo helps you because you can implement the status quo in chapter one. Give yourself the hook put. Inciting incident within the first few chapters, first few scenes, then where you want the midpoint to be, just plug in that midpoint. Then from there, you're able to draw the connections that come with the story between the midpoint and the inciting incident. You know these two parts. But how do you fill in the rest of the outline? That's whenever you can start being a little bit more creative with your subplots and things like that. What helps with the chapter outline too, is that you get an opportunity to just see the story as a big picture element whenever you add those subplots or you're plugging in things to complete a cohesive story that gets you to the end, you'll see where there's light spots. Whenever you're drafting, totally give yourself room for a little bit of creativity on coming up with things like off the cuff. That's totally fine. But whenever you're thinking about the project overall, whenever you see those gaps in different parts of your story, that's where you can fill things in, you can add a subplot, but then you have to make sure to wrap it up again later. You know what I mean? You get this idea of putting things down whenever, like if you're panting a story, you might come up with something because it just seems like something somebody might say in that moment or something then you never address it again. This would be a good way in drafting and editing to help you overall not deal with that happening. I hope that that's a little bit helpful on how to go about the chapter outlines and have your story be put there for you. This can be a bit of a time dump. I would say five to 6 hours goes into outlining a chapter outline. But it does end up really helping in the long run because whenever you're stuck, you can look at your outline, whenever you forgot, you can look at your outline. There are so many times during the drafting process where just having an outline makes it so much easier and so much faster because you don't have to constantly refresh yourself on what you already wrote because you already have it in the outline. That's my suggestion and advice to you whenever it comes to outlining your novel and implementing all the things we talked about today, that has to do with story structure and everything that makes a story and how you can start implementing to your chapter outline. 12. Review and Goodbye: Okay, we've made it to the end and thank you so much for taking the time to go through this course. Here's a little bit of a review of what we went over and how it implements to your outline. So we have our initial concept that gives us an idea of what we want the story to overall be about. This can be a way for you to write a summary for your story. Then we have our characters, which we outlined, then our theme. What do you overall want the story to be about? This isn't something you necessarily have to write down, but you can add it to your outline if that's helpful to you. Then we have structure. I gave you your little table that you can implement things into and then put into your chapter outline down at the bottom. The chapter outline is really where the scene execution comes in. How are these scenes set up? Where are they? What happens? What's the point of the scene, right then? The voice is something you take with you outside of the outline. This is just something to go over what makes a story and get you thinking about and conceptualizing overall what needs to happen in the story. Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to complete this course. I hope you learned a lot of valuable information about how to outline your story effectively. There was a lot of information to cover, but I've enjoyed compiling these tools to help you achieve your writing goals. You could find me on Threads, Instagram or Blue Sky, they're all at Madison Diaz rights. I just got a Tiktok as well. You can also subscribe to my website, blog, and get an e mail when I post. That's how I'm going to be doing my newsletters for now until I find a different process. But whenever there is an update, it'll be on my website. Yeah, thank you so much and I hope that you guys are able to implement what you need. If you are looking for consultations or coaching and a little additional help with your outline, definitely reach out to me and we can create a plan, because I offer those services as well. Thanks bye and good luck.