Sparkling Story Drafts: How to Outline Your Way Toward Cleaner Rough Drafts, Reduce Your Revision Time, and Get a First-Rate Screenplay or Novel onto the Marketplace—Faster
An essential roadmap for both new and veteran writers.
As I read SPARKLING STORY DRAFTS, I wrote a ton of sticky notes to improve my already published novels and a draft I’m working on—woohoo! Get yourself a copy. You’ll write faster and your writing will improve.
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More, more, more.
Whether screenwriter or novelist, the more you write, the more money you’re likely to earn.
The more market-ready screenplays you have, the more enticing you’ll be to an agent.
The more novels you publish, the more you’ll boost your discoverability.
But to produce more, you need more time.
Because your to-do list is lengthy.
Besides writing (and marketing), you’ve got other commitments.
Job responsibilities. A family to nurture. Not to mention self-care. To be successful, you can’t run yourself ragged.
So…How Can You Achieve Your Writing Goals When Several Demands Are Competing for Your Time—And There Are Only 24 Hours in the Day?
You must use your writing time efficiently.
You need to write quicker, you need to write better—the first time around.
Ideally, you’d write cleaner rough drafts, i.e. your first draft would be extremely close to your final draft.
Instead of being scrapped (or thoroughly rewritten), most of what you produce during your writing sessions would end up in the final product.
What a joy that would be!
If you did that, if you became this efficient, then you could produce more product and achieve your writing goals (without neglecting your other responsibilities).
That’s not to say that you want to write a screenplay or novel every month. You know if you tried to do that, you’d burn out.
But if you could just double or triple your output, if you could just finish two screenplays or three novels in a year, you’d be so much happier.
How to write more efficiently and boost your productivity? How to hit your writing goals?
Here’s one tried-and-true solution: outline your story before writing it.
This will boost your productivity for three main reasons. Let’s go through them, one by one:
(1) You’ll know where you’re headed when you write.
Outlining a novel or a script gives you a roadmap, with markers to write toward.
Usually, without a roadmap, you’d start strong…but then peter out because you’re unsure about what should happen next.
But with your roadmap (i.e. your outline), you can start strong—and stay strong.
As you can imagine, a roadmap is especially advantageous when you can only write in brief snatches. With it, you’ll spend those precious chunks of time actually writing—instead of staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor.
Despite the other demands competing for your time, you can make steady progress toward hitting your word or page count.
(2) It’s easier to identify—and fix—problem spots.
To identify problem spots in a draft, you have to wade through a lot of material (100+ pages in a screenplay; 100,000 words in a novel).
With an outline, however, you have less material to review. It’ll take you less time to figure out your edits.
With a draft, making edits can be difficult because you might be too attached to what you’ve written. Due to this attachment, you’ll only make superficial changes that don’t fix anything.
Again, with an outline, such difficulties melt away. There’s very little material to become attached to. As a result, you won’t settle for making superficial changes that don’t really improve your screenplay or novel.
Instead, you’ll cut what needs to be cut. You’ll make the drastic changes that are necessary to make your story better.
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Speaking of making drastic changes, this brings me to the third reason why outlining a story can help you save time…
(3) By outlining a novel or script in advance, you minimize unproductive labor and significantly reduce your revision time.
In an outline, your scenes are in their bare-bones phase. Because of this, you don’t have to work so hard to implement fixes.
To set up, or foreshadow a payoff, you don’t need to rewrite an entire scene or chapter. Just add a sentence or two, and you’re done.
To solve a huge escalation problem, you don’t need to toss half of your screenplay or novel—just a few plot points. That’s all.
Even better, because your scenes are yet to be written, the content of your story is fluid. It can absorb alterations—both additions and deletions—effortlessly. After you make changes, you won’t have to scramble to massage your story into shape.
When you make alterations to a draft, this is less likely to be the case—especially after fixing problems in plot and structure. Despite your best efforts, your text still might not flow smoothly. Your plot still might not make sense. Your story still might not hang together.
Essentially, with an outline, you have the opportunity to take care of big-picture items before you sit down to write your draft.
So, once your draft is done and ready for editing, you’re unlikely to be saddled with large-scale problems that require substantial time (and energy) to correct.
These have already been taken care of; all the fixes are already in place.
Thus, your list of editing tasks shouldn’t be cumbersome or time-consuming. Instead of a major overhaul or rewrite, you’re looking at more of a polish:
- punching up the dialogue
- refining your characterization and imagery
- smoothing your transitions
- fine-tuning your diction and sentence structure
- spotting typos and grammatical errors, etc.
It’s possible that your draft (based on an outline) is so clean that you only have to spend a week or two on edits before your story will be ready for the world, where it can start to earn you some money.
In contrast, a draft (written without an outline) can take months to revise.
Two weeks versus months.
I know which one makes me feel all starry-eyed.
That said, to maximize your efficiency when writing a novel or writing a screenplay, you need a systematic way to analyze your outline for problem spots.
That’s what this writing guide will teach you.
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The Benefits Keep Piling Up…
Moving on, let’s talk about a couple of advantages that we haven’t covered so far.
If you’re a screenwriter who wants assignment work (which is where the money is), then you must be able to produce a high-quality draft by a certain deadline. Same goes if you’re planning to enter a contest like the Nicholl.
Likewise, if you’re a novelist, to maintain professionalism, it’s imperative to meet your deadlines, whether they’re determined by your publisher or by your own (publicly announced) release schedule.
Basically, in many circumstances, you won’t have the time to find your story as you write it. You must know what it’s about in advance. That’s the only way you’ll be able to stick to your tight schedule and hit your deadline.
With an outline, you’ll have the information you need. You’ll already know what your story is all about. As previously explained, your outline will provide you with purpose and direction when you write.
Plus, as an additional bonus, you will—despite your looming deadline—probably feel less pressure and less stress. Why is that?
When you finish your first draft, you know it’s going to be pretty clean. In all likelihood, to get it ready for the marketplace, you’re looking at a light polish, not a major rewrite.
Also, there’s another advantage of outlining that hasn’t been mentioned yet. It has to do with the personal satisfaction of exploring your story ideas.
You probably have a notebook filled with them. And you’re excited to write about each one. But if it takes you a year (or more) to transform one idea into a draft, then very few of your ideas are going to see the light of day.
They’ll remain buried in your notebook. However…
…if you embrace outlining, you should be able to increase your production speed and double or triple your output…which means you’ll be able to bring more of your stories into the world.
You’ll get to see what your amazing story idea looks like, after it’s been transformed into a full-length screenplay or novel. This can bring increased financial rewards, sure. But it’s also immensely satisfying in its own right.
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But…What If I’m a Pantser? Can This Outlining Book Help Me?
What if you’re a “pantser” (a writer who likes to write on the fly, by the seat of your pants)?
Well, in order to reap the full benefits of outlining (e.g. avoid painful rewrites and shave off several weeks—possibly months—of revision time), you have to make a concession.
You have to let go of the joy of discovering your story as you go along, of being surprised by where your characters take you.
For the record, I think this joy is still there when you outline. It’s there when you:
- initially develop your story idea into an outline
- cycle through possible fixes and enhancements as you refine your outline
- sit down to write out your scenes, and your characters startle you with the wit and insight of their dialogue
Put another way, when you outline, there are still some surprises. But because you’ve participated in story prep and mapped out your plot in advance, everything isn’t a surprise. Hence, the sensation of joy feels less intense.
Anyway, as a pantser, you might not be able to make this concession. That’s okay. Sparkling Story Drafts can still help you out.
Only instead of using this writing guide to reduce your revision time, you’ll use it to diagnose problems in your draft—as well as devise fixes.
To quickly recap, if you hold fast to pantsing, then you can use this book to write a better story. If you wholeheartedly embrace outlining, then this book can help you write a better story—faster.
Either way, you’ll come out on top, with a screenplay or novel that’s ready to sell. Best of all, you’ll be able to…
Take It Easy—Step by Step
Writing a screenplay or novel that’s good enough for the marketplace is a daunting task. But it becomes far more manageable if it’s broken down into smaller action steps.
This writing guide does that. Where appropriate, each chapter ends with simple action steps that, together, form a practical, systematic way to quickly produce a story that sparkles.
Here’s a brief sampling of what you will accomplish by following these steps. You’ll:
- zap episodic plots with a secret ingredient (if you’re writing a hero’s journey story, this is a must-have)
- pump up your story structure so it delivers maximum entertainment value
- apply a psychology trick to your genre goods to make your story even more addictive to read (or watch)
- tweak your stakes so that they amplify the emotional volume (and therefore, keep readers glued to the pages of your screenplay or novel)
- determine whether surprise is really the best option to delight audiences, or if there’s an alternative option that’ll prove superior
- time your major reveals so that they live up to the hype
- implement a powerful defensive strategy against accusations of contrivance (best practices, included!)
- cut scenes you love (but which don’t advance the plot)—while still feeling good about making the change
- integrate subplots in a way that enhances the main plot, rather than detracting from it
- preserve story momentum (PS: One solution doesn’t just melt away exposition woes. It can also revitalize a plot that feels threadbare.)
- fend off “action fatigue” (choose from 7 different fixes) as well as sidestep sluggish pacing
- achieve the ideal cast size, so that audiences can easily keep track of what’s going on (while still remaining emotionally involved in the action)
- keep a writing virtue in check (in excess, it turns into a vice, ultimately making your characters too boring to bother with)
- avoid succumbing to 3 last-minute temptations that undermine your protagonist
- run through 4 quick tests to prevent dull or useless scenes from cluttering up your story
Buy this step-by-step writing guide today and usher in an era of faster writing (and fewer edits)!
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