[Music] hello everyone my name is KM wiland and I am the author of the books outlining your novel and the outline your novel workbook and as such one of the questions that I frequently get from people is why outline why should we go to all this extra trouble of writing our story before the story basically before we get to all the fun stuff of actually drafting the story well if you've ever actually written a first draft then undoubtedly you've run into those moments where nothing's working and it's not so much fun anymore you're beating your
head against your keyboard because you don't know where the story is supposed to go you have maybe a vague idea of how you want it to end but you have no idea how to get your characters to that end in a way that makes sense and that will resonate with your readers on a deeper level well outlining is in my experience the answer to this question because when you're able to approach the outlining process from a place of Discovery and excitement and figure out all of the major questions about your story you're then able to
apply that in the first draft to create to not only create a story that is seamless and strong and makes sense and is going to resonate with readers on both a logical and emotional level but it also makes the entire process so much more fun because all of the pieces are laid out in front of you you know how to make them work and you're not constantly struggling with trying to find the right questions to ask so you can find the right answers so that is why I am such a tremendous proponent of outlining and
that is why we have created the outlining your novel workbook computer program which takes my outlining your novel workbook which was a paperback and an ebook and takes all of the questions and exercises from that and puts them into this computer program where you're able to have a guided process for working through your outline and figuring out all of these important questions about your story while still tapping into that all important subconscious creativity and for me that's very important to understand when we're talking about outlines a lot of us hear the word outline and we
start thinking about those horrible mind-numbing Roman numeral outlines from when we were in high school that is not the outlining process that I recommend for me outlining is synonymous with brainstorming you're using this process to delve into all of the amazing possibilities in your story so that you're making sure you're taking full advantage of it you're covering all your bases when it comes to structure and character Arc and theme so that you have the tools at your disposal when you're actually ready to start writing that first draft so really quick I just want to kind
of show you how the program works and what you can do with it basically this is based on my own approach to outlining that I use in when I outlining every one of my novels I like to start with the big picture and then kind of work your way down um we can we start with premise where you can fill out your premise sentence and then we move on to really fun things like um here the what if questions which is one of the most popular exercises that um people have found in my books and
this is basically where you're just throwing ideas onto the page and seeing where it leads you the program then guides you in creating a scene list a scene by scene list that you can use to create you know this solid first draft um character Arc and theme you're guided through doing that with just some questions that will help you think about the important um aspects of this there is a character interview which um I tend to like a very in-depth interview I think there's about a 100 questions in this at this point um obviously you
can use as many or as few of them as you like guides you through thinking about your settings which is something a lot of people don't necess necessarily think about in the outlining stage until or even in the first draft until they actually get to particular scenes but this is an incredibly important decision for creating cohesion within your overall story and even for underlying underlining your theme and then we have questions just about the the outline itself and also some fun extras um places to import mind maps um Maps if you're writing fantasy or historical
or whatever as well as um calendar for keeping track of your time this is really fun it's a playlist you can import um specific songs that apply to your entire book your protagonist your antagonist Etc and then play them right here in the program so what the reason that we created this program was ultimately because outlining is such an important and useful tool for writers and yet it's it's a misunderstood and I think a lot of writers are afraid of it both because don't know where to start and because it can seem overwhelming so what
we've tried to do here is create a a guided process that walks you through intuitively from beginning to end what you need to do to take your raw ideas and refine them into something that actually works and is structured properly through the entire three acts to create a solid first draft while still leaving lots of room for you to explore in your own way and to find what whatever process best anticipates and enhances your own creativity so I hope that outlining is something that you will give a try and that the program ends up being
very helpful to you in writing your best stories [Music]
