Outlining Fun

I hate outlining!

I never outline for a first draft. I usually know how a story starts and the general direction that it is heading, but I don't sit down and write out every step along the way. For me, outlining leaves no room for creativity and imagination to work while the story is coming to life. Outlines take a lot of of the fun and mystery out of the first draft.

However, once the first draft is done, I usually sit down and write and outline.

This not my favorite part of the writing process. Outlining is drudgery. But it is necessary. Outlining helps me know that all the parts of the story come together and nothing is left hanging.

I've been stuck for several months (read over a year) on my current WIP because I needed to write out the outline for the next draft. Did I mention that I hate outlining?

Usually, I sit down and write out the whole outline in a notebook in pencil so that I could move things around and make changes as I thought of them. The outline is several pages long, full of erased marks, smudges, and arrows (when I got tired of erasing and rewriting). It's a lot of work, as anyone who has done it knows. This time, I just couldn't make myself do it. I needed something different. Something that allowed me to see the whole story at once.

This is what I came up with.

What is it? This is my "storyboard" outline of Hope's Child, my WIP.

I took a 2'x3' cork board and sectioned it off with string to make 32 boxes. Each box represents a chapter in my WIP. I then got different colored index cards and quartered them. Each color represents a different part of the story. I love to be able to easily follow plot points in this way.

Making a storyboard outline took the same amount of time (if not a little longer since I was learning as I went) as making a regular outline, but I like the finished product a whole lot better. I may never go back to writing my outlines out in longhand.

Do you outline before you write? What have you found that works for you?