Pointers for Story Lines

Learning the Knit

Last chapter, we talked about the importance of outlining in a plot. In this chapter, we would actually tell you how to outline.

Each story has a beginning, a middle and an end. An outline will help you create a map to your own world; so that you can deliver to your audience great chapters. Here are 2 of the most efficient ones:

1º Skeletal Outline

2º Flashlight Outline

Please remember there other ways to outline and these ones may not suit your writing style or you main character's voice.

Skeletal Outline

If you're struggling to form a plot this is easier option between these two. Have a look this example:

Chapter 1: Exposition

The story takes place in Willard Asylum in 1995.

Enzo, the main character, is introduced.

Chapter 2: Inciting Incident

Enzo finds more than a few suitcases containing the belongings of people who had lived and died there.

Chapter 3: Rising action

He finds a suitcase that belonged to his mother, who spent 3 years there before being transferred to another asylum. Enzo wanted to know why his mother's body was shipped off to be used in medical research.

Chapter 4: Climax

50 days later, he returns to the remains of the Willard State Psychiatric Hospital to look for more of his mother belongings and gets attacked. He wakes up hours later alone in his car. He was left a note which said to never return to Willard, but he does anyway and almost dies. He fights to survive people that were working for a secret organization.

Chapter 5: Falling action

He luckily escapes. Enzo changes his identity and leaves North America.

Chapter 6: Resolution

He settles in Japan. 3 years later he receives a file with what really happened to his mother.

Flashlight Outline

With this method you discover the story gradually while still doing enough planning that you can anticipate anything. Have a look this example:

Chapter 1: Beyond the bright lights of Atlantic City, New Jersey, lies a dark mystery of murder and prostitution at the Golden Key Motel. In November 2006, two women stumbled upon the body of Kim Raffo lying face down in a drainage ditch behind the Golden Key Motel. After being called to the scene, police uncovered three more bodies, all in various states of decomposition, in the same ditch. Their names were Tracy Ann Roberts, Barbara Breidor, and Molly Dilts. All four women had worked as prostitutes in the area.

Chapter 2: Dilts was believed to have been killed first, about a month before her body was found, and then Breidor, Roberts, and Raffo. Dilts and Breidor were so badly decomposed that authorities couldn't determine a cause of death, but both Roberts and Raffo had been asphyxiated.

Chapter 3: Police believed they had a serial killer on their hands. Their two main suspects were Terry Oleson, a man who lived at the hotel and worked as a handyman, and Eldred Raymond Burchell (aka the "River Man") who had supposedly confessed to another prostitute about killing people. Oleson submitted DNA samples, but no forensic match was made. Burchell could not be reached for questioning.

Other chapters: No arrests were ever made. But authorities have continued to pursue the case and the serial killer possibility, especially after several more women were killed the same way in Long Island.

***** Story comes from Listverse.com