Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

Overview of Million Dollar Outlines

Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

by

David Farland

Please note that this work is copyrighted by David Farland, and no part may be published without his expressed permission.

David Farland has trained dozens of New York Times bestselling authors over the years—people like Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), Brandon Sanderson (Wheel of Time), and Brandon Mull (Fablehaven) all came to him before they had ever sold a novel, then they went on to make millions.

As a greenlighting analyst, David Farland worked helping with novels and films (as a consultant he urged Scholastic to push Harry Potter big, long before they were willing to do so).

And as a videogame designer he helped create stellar games like Starcraft: Brood War.

Eventually, people began asking him to teach a class on how to integrate high-level audience analysis into the design of a new intellectual property—a book or movie—and his popular writing course was born.

This book is used during the course as a reference—a refresher for many of the main ideas. An earlier edition was hastily thrown together, but this new edition is heavily rewritten and hopefully will help you learn not just how to outline, but how to begin tweaking your work in major intellectual properties before you ever begin writing.

Let's face it: there are a lot of places where you can learn to outline a story. I've read books on the topic, studied card systems used in Hollywood, and even computer programs that can all teach you how to outline well.

Two Approaches to Storytelling

There are two major approaches to writing a story: discovery writing and outlining. Neither approach is completely right nor wrong, and most authors take a hybrid approach. So let's discuss each approach, along with its strengths and pitfalls.

Discovery Writers

A discovery writer is one who likes to begin a story without really knowing where it will end. Stephen King is an excellent example of a discovery writer. Such writers enjoy the process of "discovering" the story as it unfolds. Often, a writer who is deeply involved in a novel will be writing about a character and suddenly recognize that unexpected things are happening: the killer in a mystery turns out to be the protagonist himself, or the hero actually fails in his quest.

Discovery writing is an excellent way to create stories that feel organic. Characters often tend to come out well-rounded in discovery stories, and settings come to life.

However, I've known countless discovery writers who have problems with weak middles and sluggish endings because they don't control where the story is going; or maybe the writer takes ages to write a novel because he ends up following characters down blind alleys.

Very often, in discovery novels, the focus on the primary character shifts from one protagonist to another over the course of the novel, or the major conflicts that the author started with aren't the ones that get resolved. When this happens, the reader feels cheated because the author hasn't kept the promises that were set up at the beginning of the tale.