3 Ways to Outline Your Nonfiction Book

[upbeat music] So why am I so adamant that you must have an outline for your nonfiction book? Well, I wanna start this video by getting into the things that your outline will do for you before I briefly cover each of these techniques with, by the way, free resources included for two of them, and a third really exciting option for one of them.

Okay, so first of all, what are the reasons that you need an outline? Well, the most literary, the most craft-based reason is that when we are writing a book, we are necessarily in the weeds.

Those words, those sentences, those paragraphs, those are actually quite a small percentage of your larger manuscript.

When you think, for instance, of an average business book, that might be 45,000 to 60,000 words.

An average memoir may be more like 60 to 80,000 words.

Each of those individual words tell us very, very little about the shape of the book as a whole.

That, in fact, is what the outline does for us.

When we are in the weeds like that, focusing on the individual words, individual sentences, we often cannot hold in our brain the other parts of the book that are at places where we aren't currently working.

So what does an outline do for us in this case? Well, when we have an outline, especially when it has enough detail to really understand the full book at a glance, what we have given ourselves is a way to look at the 10,000-foot view of our project, how all of the pieces we're working on are going to fit together while we are also in the weeds.

In other words, it makes sure that as we are writing those words and those sentences and those paragraphs, we are actually doing so in a particular planned direction, and that direction is a finished, readable book.

Without that 10,000-foot view, we are much less able to write in a way that is intentional, in a way that is thoughtful, and most importantly, in a way that is actually serving the project as a whole and not just that day's writing time.

But that really leads me into the second reason that we need an outline, and that is that books are long, and not only in terms of those word counts I was mentioning earlier.

Books are also long in that they just take a long time.

Now, I know some of y'all are faster than others.

I have had clients write all kinds of books, even recently memoir, within a couple of months.

And y'all, I'm so impressed by that if that is something that you are able to do.

But me and most of my clients do not have that ability to speed through the manuscript and still do a good job.

So what does that mean for us? Well, it means that if we just start writing and we don't have any sense of where we're going, what we're supposed to be working on, we are very, very likely to find ourselves lost.

Instead, when we have an outline, we know exactly what is going to happen at each point in the book.

Well, now we can either use that outline as our plan, right? We can either use that as, "Okay, today I'm gonna work on this chapter.

Here's what that chapter is about." That is very, very helpful for orienting ourselves, and/or we can also use that outline to allow ourselves to move around the book.

So for instance, if you are working on a memoir that has a really tough emotional scene, well, if you have an outline, you realistically can skip that chapter and move on to the next one because you know what is happening in each individual chapter.

Now, does that mean it's going to be smooth and require no revision? No.

[laughs] In no case will your nonfiction book require zero revision.

I'm so, so sorry.