You might have heard the first step of writing a book is creating an outline. It’s true that an outline can be a big help in organizing a book. But it’s not necessarily the first step.
Some book topics lend themselves well to outlines, especially how-to books where the steps of a process are clear. But other topics might be more difficult to put into an outline up front. Some books are a process of discovery in the writing.
How can you create an outline up front if you don’t know yet what you’re going to write?
How do you take that journey of discovery as a writer that leads eventually to an outline?
Introducing the clothesline: a flexible, creative, discoverable approach that will eventually emerge into an outline for your book.
The Clothesline Approach
Picture a clothesline and those wonderful clothespins holding each unique, colorful item of clothing in place. Those items of clothing represent your ideas for your book: chapter ideas, reflections, bullet points, examples.
When you’re first starting out, your only objective is to write those pieces and pin them on the clothesline, so to speak. Don’t worry about how they fit together and in what order. Just create them and put them somewhere on the clothesline.
As you add more pieces, you’ll get a clearer idea of what you have in your collection. At that point, you’ll start to see how they fit together. The beauty of a clothesline is that you can move pieces around as much as you want until the sequence makes sense for your book.
Look through Your Reader’s Eyes
After you reach the stage where your pieces have come together, you can walk along from one end to the other and see it the way your reader would see it.
Look at that clothesline journey through your reader’s eyes. For example, let’s say you’ve put several chapter ideas on your clothesline and rearranged them in an order that makes sense to you. Now, walk through it as if you were a reader of your book. Does the order make sense to your reader?
Does the reader need to read a particular chapter first to make sense of another chapter? Does the reader need a particular example before or after a certain concept is explained? Where are the gaps? Is something missing that would make things clearer for your reader? The clothesline concept can give you clarity about your reader’s journey through your book.
When you reach a point where you no longer need to rearrange, add, or remove items from your clothesline, then you’ll have your book outline. You’ll be ready to bring all that material together.
Setting up Your Clothesline
How do you set up your clothesline? Do what works best for you. For some writers, you might stretch a piece of twine across a wall, write your ideas on sticky notes, and use clothespins to hang them on the twine.
Other writers may be more comfortable drawing a clothesline on a poster board and moving sticky notes around on it.
For writers more comfortable with digital corkboards, you’ll find book outlining software that can help you create your clothesline and move pieces around.
The key is to create your pieces, put them up where you can see them, figure out how they fit together (taking your time, creatively, experimenting, moving them around), and finally following along the clothesline with a reader’s perspective. By then, your rough book outline will emerge. It can still be changed around, but you’ll have a clearer sense of how the pieces fit together.
This Week’s Starting Point
This week, create your clothesline and write your first three ideas to pin on it. That’s how your book outline gets started. That’s how your book writing journey begins.
Janet Eriksson 