Actionable Strategies for Implementing Your Book Outline

00:13 - Unicorn Ghostwriter (Host)

Hi everyone. This is Lynn of Liquidity Smart, just with another episode of Write, edit and Publish podcast, so I am really excited this week to bring you an episode on essential tools for book outlining. So these are going to be you an episode on essential tools for book outlining. So these are going to be tools you can use to outline your book. So this is part of the outlining episode series, so I hope this series has been really informational for you. If you have not checked out the last few episodes, we talked all about book outlining and how to outline your book and why you want to outline your book and all sorts of different aspects just around book outlining, because book outlining is just such an important part of creating your book. So today's episode nine is essential tools for book outlining, and we're going to explore amazing tools that can transform your outlining process, saving you time and energy and frustration, keeping you organized in while you're writing.

01:01

So, whether you're a tech enthusiast or you prefer traditional pen and paper, I have something for you, and doesn't matter what type of writer you are. So let's first jump into the digital deep dive. What tools can you use digitally to help you with your writing and organizing? This is one of my favorite things. I love writing and organizing in digitally, so you can use lots of different tools.

01:24

So the first one we'll talk about is Scrivener. So Scrivener is an all-in-one writing studio and tool. Okay, you have a corkboard view for scene organization. You've got some character and setting sheets. You can even write screenwriting plays on Scrivener. There's character and setting sheets. You can tag characters with keywords and information. You can tag information with keywords and information. You can tag information with keywords. There's a research folder integration, which is really fabulous for research, especially if you're writing historical fiction. Scrivener is fabulous. Scrivener. I feel like it's good for writing non-fiction, but its real strength is writing fiction and characters and doing that re that research folder integration, especially if you're writing historical fiction. They've got split screen capability. There is a screen where you don't have any type of reminders coming in, so it's very focused screen, which is really fabulous, so you don't get distracted and you can export your book to multiple formats using Scrivener. So it's a really great way to organize.

02:23

Now I will say, if this is your first time writing a book, I would not try it with Scrivener. So it's a really great way to organize. Now I will say if this is your first time writing a book, I would not try it with Scrivener because it does have quite of a learning curve and I would suggest finding a Scrivener course to learn Scrivener because it is hard. It's kind of like the Photoshop of writing tools. And I do have Scrivener but I actually have not used it. I tried using it to write my first book and that was definitely not a good idea. So I recommend, if you're writing your first book, write it on Google Docs or Word or something easy or Notes. Definitely, don't write it inside Scrivener. But once you get your first book written and you've published it and you've marketed it and everything, I would definitely take some time to learn Scrivener if you're going to write a fiction, especially if you're going to write a fiction book, because it's a really great tool, all right.

03:04

So let's talk about Plotter. So Plotter I love because, especially if you have something that's specifically timeline based, plotter is absolutely fabulous. So I've been using Plotter lately for helping me with some character arc mapping because I'm writing, working on writing a fiction book next year. So what I'm doing is I'm going into Midjourney, which is a image AI, and I am writing descriptions of the character that I want, and so then you can make a character in Plotter and put it in like so I make the picture and then I put that picture in the description of the character and like, this character is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and you put your whole character description in there, right? So it's really great for timeline based because you can see literally across the screen your whole timeline what characters do what, and it has all these really great templates. It has series planning capabilities in it. It has a template library, which is fabulous. It's pretty much any template you can think of any basic template, for sure. Visual plot organization, right, which is really fabulous because you can pull it up and you can see visually the where the plots land on your timeline. And it also has custom metadata fields. So if you want to have some custom fields in there, you want to like organize them based on maybe your something you're doing with your specific novel or fiction or nonfiction book, you can do that as well. So I love Plotter. I recently bought a subscription to that and I really like it because it's really I love visual timelines. So if you love visual timelines and visual organizing like that, plotter is a good tool to try out for sure.

04:31

All right, mind mapping software. So there's a few different types of mind mapping software and we talked about mind mapping in another episode, in another couple episodes. So mind mapping is where you use the circle in the middle and you have little spokes I call it the spoken wheel and then you put your chapters out that and then you put lines off of that and then you have your subchapter information. So if you like to use the mind mapping method, you can use something like Xmind or MindMeister. There's FreeMind and there's also a couple other mind mapping.

05:09

There's a whole bunch of mind mapping software out there. Some of the mind mapping software has a free version, some does not. So it's really just kind of like how you like to use the mind mapping software. Because there's so many different kinds, I'm not going to jump into all of them, but if you just look up like free mind mapping software and Google that up, right, some of them have like a 14-day trial. Some of them have that whole free version, but most of them will have like some kind of trial period and a lot of times you have to put your credit card in. So just consider that. Make sure if you have a free trial period, you do it. You make sure you put a reminder on your phone to cancel it. If you that way, if you don't like it, then you're not paying for something and wasting your money that on a tool that you're not using, okay.

05:40

So, um, the benefits are you can do visual brainstorming right, and relationship matching. That's easy to reorganize because it's on, it's digital, right, so you just click it and move it around. You don't have to use an eraser or a pencil, and it has really great collaboration features. So, like unlike pencil and paper, which I love to use pencil and paper like you can collaborate with other people on your mind map. So if you're doing a collaboration with other people, like on a book, then a digital online mapping tool, a mind map, would be super helpful for you because clearly you can do pencil and paper and send people pictures, but it's not as easy or as efficient as having an online mind mapping tool.

06:19

Okay, note-taking apps right. So Apple has a app that says notes, so you can use Apple Notes and I've done that for book ideas and helping with starting organizations, starting some ideas on books and some basic outlining in notes. I've done that and the thing I love about Apple Notes is, if you have a computer and a phone and a tablet or not a tablet, a Apple iPad that it syncs across everything. So if you have your iCloud account, you can sync all this information across all of your devices. No matter which one you open up, your notes are going to be updated, so that's a super fabulous option on notes for Apple products.

06:59

And then there's other note-taking apps like Evernote, which is really great for revising and adding information in Evernote. So that is similar for revising and adding information in Evernote. So that is similar to Notes, except it's a little more organized. You can put things in different folders, which you can also do on Notes on Apple, but with Evernote I think they have a free and a paid version. I've used Evernote for a long time but I haven't used it in a while. But it is really great for outlining. You use it to outline and organize your information for your book in Evernote. I have several writer friends who use Evernote to do that.

07:27

There's OneNote, which is a Microsoft product, and I am not a Microsoft product user typically, except for Word, but there's OneNote which can also help you outline your thing. There's also Notion. So Notion's like a Trello board, where it helps with like project management, more or less, but you can also use it to help outline your book or take notes as well. Okay, so key features are you can do cross-sync along devices. Like I mentioned earlier, you could do web clipping, so clipping information off the web and put them in these different types of note-keeping devices. There's tag organization so you can tag things. So if you're looking for a specific topic that you talked about, you can tag all of these different types of notes and then search for tags to find things easily, which gives you great search functionality.

08:13

All right, so let's talk about the next part, which is physical tools and their magic, right? So if you are the pen and paper person, like I am, I love pen and paper for certain things, right, like no matter what, I'm always going to love writing on pen and paper for certain types of things. So I actually recently got a Remarkable tablet which, if you don't know what that is, it's basically like an electronic notebook that you can write on. That feels like paper, which I absolutely love, but it's actually electronic. So you sync it and it syncs up to the cloud, so everything gets saved and stored and then you can use it on your computer, on your laptop, online, on your online account, or you can use Remarkable on your notepad as well. So it's a really, really great device for taking notes. I love it.

08:57

I don't know that I would put personally my story things in that I like it more for like note taking during meetings and note taking like when I have like several different notes for one different subject, like marketing and things like that. My marketing notes I put in there, but I haven't used it and I don't think I would personally use it for doing that type of outlining for your book. But you can do that. If you prefer to use like a electronic tablet instead of paper, you could use a remarkable, all right. So let's get back to physical tool. It's another physical tool which is notebooks, right, so you can use building journals, composition books, writing journals.

09:34

If you're going to use a notebook, I would recommend getting a notebook with no lines, because then you can write arrows and all sorts of stuff. You can write sideways, you can write like upside down, you can write in circles, you can write like put boxes in it and graphs and like draw all sorts of stuff to like help separate your content that you're handwriting in your book. So if you're going to use a notebook, I would suggest using one without lines. My favorite notebook is the one I have here at my desk which I can't remember the name. Oh, it's a Moleskine, I believe. Yes, my cat is sitting on my notebook next to my video. You cannot see him. Anyway. He's here. Anyway, it's a Moleskine notebook and I love it because it has really great quality paper and there's no lines in the notebook. So I always recommend people, if you're going to do a notebook, get one without lines. Okay. So the benefits, of course, to notebooks is there's no technology barriers, right. You have creative freedom to do whatever. It's really easy to portable and it's a tactile experience Okay. So those are the benefits of using notebooks Index cards, so I've seen people do planning on index cards or sticky notes.

10:37

So let's talk about index cards first. So you can do scene planning. So you write the scene on the front, on the back, you describe it. You can do the same thing with character profiles as well. So notebooks have all these great things.

10:51

Index cards, okay. So we talked about scene planning, character profiles, plot point organization, right. So on the front, on the black side, blank side, you can write plot points, points and you can organize them on the line side. So the thing you want to remember with index cards is you always want to put your main category on the blank side and then you put your details on the other side, whether you're doing scene planning, character profiles, plot point organization, or maybe you're outlining your book right, and you put your chapter number and your chapter title on your blank side and then maybe you write the things you're going to write about in the chapter on the line side of your index cards. So the advantages are these are super easy to rearrange right, they're portable, durable and they're very cost effective for index cards. And you can get small index cards, you can get big ones, you can get colored ones if you want to color coordinate your things. So there's lots of different ways you can use index cards, all right.

11:43

So let's talk about whiteboards. I love whiteboards for plotting things out because you get large scale visualization. I had this ginormous whiteboard in my last house that I really wish I had in my house now because it was really big and I was able to use. I got these magnets on amazon that had a dry erase surface on them so I could write a topic on them and then put it on my whiteboard, because it was magnetic, and then make my outline that way, which I really like that. You like doing mind maps like that, so you got that really great large scale. It's very visual. You can do timeline creation on this as well. Whiteboards are really great too, for if you want to do a physical timeline creation and map out your timeline on a whiteboard and again, I love those magnets like the dry erase magnets, so I can like easily move those. So it's kind of like having index cards or sticky notes on your whiteboard. So it's literally like a magnet. That's a rectangular magnet that you can write on with a dry erase marker. So they're great too because they're movable. But you can also adjust what's written on the magnet really easily, all right. So these are great.

12:43

Whiteboards are great for chapter planning, plot hole identification, character relationship mapping, some brain dumping like connecting things with arrows and visual cues like that are really great, all right. Post-it notes this is another really popular one. So post-it notes are great because you can color code them really easily. These are great for scene organization, for mapping things out, like your outline, your storyboarding. The benefits are your visual organization. It's easy to reorganize, although you have to be careful because if your sticky note comes off and you won't know where it was in the timeline and it's space saving right and collaborative planning. You don't need a big whiteboard for it. But the other thing I will say is make sure you have a wall that the sticky notes stick on really well. Or, if you don't want to put it on your wall, you can get like a board just for your sticky notes to stick them on as well, which is really easy.

13:38

Okay, so we're going to take a break right here, my friends. When we come back, we're going to talk about choosing your tool and how to choose the tool that works best with your writing style. Hey, future authors. Linda Liquidy Smarges back with the second half of today's episode. We're talking about essential tools for book outlining and I'm so glad you're here to learn about all these different tools you can use for book outlining. And I'm so glad you're here to learn about all these different tools you can use for book outlining.

14:20

Outlining is not just the traditional outline I grew up with in my school, which is like room. Numeral one, capital letter, a little number. One little letter, a right, it's so many more tools to outline things, and it's not just that boring linear fashion. I mean, if you want to use that boring linear fashion, you completely can, but you don't have to. You can use one of these other fun tools that works better with your learning style. All right, so let's talk about how to choose your perfect tool.

14:46

So you want to consider some things when choosing your tool. Right? What is your writing style preference? If you're not a techie and you don't like using the computer, then don't use the computer. You don't't have to, don't feel like you have to use a computer to do your outline. Right, you can use any of these paper and pencil methods that we talked about, including whiteboards or sticky notes or notebooks or index cards or whatever it is you want to use. Right? What is works best for your style and your learning style? Right? How complex is your project?

15:14

If it's something that has a lot of little details in it, you definitely probably want to use something that has technology to to make sure that you file all these details. And I want to give you this tip, my friends whatever technology you're using, make sure you have it on auto backup to back up to the cloud every day, because you don't want to lose your work. Okay, whether that's your computer stolen, your computer gets hacked into or phished, or you spill water on your computer, right, and it breaks. If you lose all that work, you're going to be kicking yourself and you are going to cry for days. So make sure you're backing up that technology and it's on auto backup every day. All right, I know my iCloud is on auto backup every day. It auto backs up everything, so I will never lose my work, which is really great, all right. So I will never lose my work, which is really great, all right.

16:01

So what are your budget constraints? Right, if you are a new author and maybe you don't, or you're not a new author but you're maybe a young kid in college right, you don't have a lot of money to invest in a program. Use index cards, get a whiteboard right Off of Walmart. There's a lot of really budget-friendly things you can do. Um, maybe you found a free mind mapping tool that don't require a huge investment when you're outlining your book, all right. What are your collaboration needs? Are there multiple people working on this project? If so, you definitely want something that's cloud-based and not paper-based, because paper-based is going to be way too hard and too difficult and very clunky if you're doing a collaborative project with somebody. So the collaborative project I did with two other people who we authored a book together, we did everything on Google Drive because Google Drive is collaborative and we shared all the documents in the folder so that we can access all the things we need to access your learning curve comfort.

16:57

Are you okay with learning something complex, like Scrivener? Are you not okay with learning something complex? Are you okay with learning a new technology? Are you maybe okay with learning a new technology that's really easy to use, but you're not okay with learning a new technology that's not easy to use, right? So figure that out and hopefully they have a trial thing. If you're not sure, you can always email the company, say, hey, do you have a trial version of this? I just want to see if it's something that I like and find out.

17:22

All right, backup requirements. Like I said before, what are the backup requirements? Do you have to have? What type of hard drive space? Maybe do you need to put that on your computer, okay? So a lot of these programs. Have a app that you can use so you can download it and you can work offline. Have a app that you can use so you can download it and you can work offline, and then it will. It will automatically sync to the cloud and then you can work online as well.

17:46

All right, so let's talk about some real-world applications. So we talked about how to use index cards. Oh, romance authors, timeline planning, nonfiction, organization systems, series planning with digital tools. I mean, there's so many different real world applications you can use with all of these different things that we talked about, right? No matter whether it's a paper planner with paper and pencil or pen, and or you're using a digital planner, right? There's whatever you can think of use it to apply.

18:19

I would love to know how you're using any one of these tools and applying them to making outline or organizing your book. If you have a way or an idea that you think is really great, I would love to have you on the show to explain it or at least leave it in the comments below. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you're not watching this on YouTube and you're listening to it, you can, or even if you are on YouTube, you can go to my website, writeforyoume, click on the contact page. Again writeforyoume. It's W-R-I-T-E-F-O-R-Y-O-Ume. Click on the contact page and tell me how you're using any one of these tools, even if it's index cards or sticky notes. I would love to know how you're using it and let me know if you'd be interested in coming on an episode or write and publish to talk about how you use your tool. I'd love to have you as a guest.

19:04

All right, my future authors, here's some pro tips for you. Remember, start with one tool and check it out and see how it works for you right. Play with it for a couple weeks, two or three weeks and see how you like it right. It's really easy to jump from tool to tool to tool. Or, even worse, if you've ever been on app sumo and if you don't know what that is, it's literally a website that has all these tools for, like, really discounted prices, and it's super dangerous. I never go on it anymore, not because it's not a great site, but because it has all these tools for, like, really cheap prices. I end up buying a bunch of stuff and I don't use hardly any of it, or none of it, and then I've spent all this money on tools I don't use, because it's like a kid in a candy store.

19:43

If you love tech and programs, right. It's like all of these special programs that are new rolling out and they're like $9 a piece or whatever, right so. But AppSumo is great. If you know what you're looking for and you need a specific app, go into the AppSumo to find a new program that you can get at a good discounted price.

20:02

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20:38

All right, consider hybrid approaches, so like maybe you outline your mind map, like I do, on a piece of paper with a pencil, and I do a mind map with a paper and pencil, but then I transfer that information into a google doc, right? Or I transfer that information into scrivener or wherever it is, or Plotter All right, so you can use a combination of digital and traditional methods. You don't have to use all of one or the other and focus on what works for you, right, what works best for your learning style and, again, keep backups of everything. A great way to keep backup of your written work is to take pictures of it on your phone and to email it to yourself. That way, if your phone breaks, right, and your phone has not updated in photos, then you won't lose your picture of your work. You will email it to yourself every day as soon as you take a picture of it. That way, you have a backup of it in your email. So if your phone breaks or it gets damaged and you can't pull the information off your phone's memory, then you have that backup of that physical work, right Of that physical pen and paperwork.

21:38

All right, thanks for joining me again, my future author, on another episode of Write, edit and Publish.

21:42

Don't forget to check our show notes for all the links for your resources that we discussed and again tune in next week to find out how to take your great, organized outline and make a compelling first draft with it. Again, keep creating and remember future authors. If you want to create and see your book dreams sparkle into reality, then click the Discovery Call button and let's weave your story into gold. As your ghostwriting unicorn, I will fast track your journey from idea to published author in as little as 90 days. I will fast track your journey from idea to published author in as little as 90 days. So if that sounds like something you're interested in and you would like a published book in the next three months, by summertime, definitely hit the discovery call button on, which is in the show notes here, or you can go to writeforyoume and click on the discovery call button, because your magical transformation begins with just one click to book your discovery call today. All right, my friends, I'll see you next week on another episode of Write, edit and Publish.