Outline? Who needs an outline? So you sit down and write your self-help / prescriptive nonfiction Book like you write your journal or your Artist’s Way morning pages, letting whatever comes to your mind each day just spill out onto the page.

Weeks go by, and you feel good. Before you know it, you’ve accumulated almost 100,000 words of what you know is gold. (Never mind that the average book these days is more in the range of 50,000–65,000 words or even fewer.)

You finally start reading the gold you’ve written and realize it’s all over the place. You started covering one topic but veered off onto another topic two pages later. Then, you picked up the original topic 50 pages in. Suddenly, you feel discouraged. How are you ever going to make sense of this? The editing is going to take forever. You’ve got to figure out how to move things around so that a reader who isn’t in your head can understand it.

“Okay, I’ll start on this next week,” you tell yourself, “I can’t face it right now.” But then, life gets in the way, and your book sits on your hard drive . . . and sits . . . and sits. Nothing about it feels fun anymore.

This is what happens when you don’t create an outline! Trust me — after 20 years in the publishing industry, I have watched this happen to more authors than I can remember.

It may feel like a lot of work on the front end (ahem . . . like school) to create an outline, but without one, you’ll generate three times as much work for yourself on the back end. Don’t tell yourself that an outline will stifle your creative flow either. It won’t. It isn’t engraved in stone, but it is like a roadmap for your book.

Think of it this way: let’s say you want to travel from Nebraska to New York, and you’d like to get there in a reasonable amount of time. You aren’t likely to drive to California and then through Texas to finally end up in the northeast.

So you’re sensible. You set your GPS to get you from Nebraska to New York in the most expedient way possible. That’s what your outline does for you. But what if there’s road work along the way that the GPS hasn’t accounted for? You’ll have to make some adjustments and take a detour, finding your way back to the GPS directions as soon as you can.

The same is true for your outline. If something doesn’t work along the way, make adjustments where necessary. But having that original roadmap will give you a true north star to point toward.

Your True North

The concept of your true north is an important one when it comes to writing a book. It’s the “hook” or topic of your book. It’s what your book is about. Even better, it’s the promise your book will make to your readers. What is the main thing it will provide them by the time they finish reading it?

If you can come up with a working title and subtitle, it will be helpful to you. Then, as you create your outline and write your book, keep reminding yourself to point toward that true north title and subtitle. Everything in the book — and I mean everything — has to be in service of that true north. If it isn’t, it either has to come out, or the true north of your book has to change.

But wait . . . what if you aren’t sure of the topic of your book yet? Do you have to figure it out before you can write an outline? Not necessarily. The method I’m about to teach you should help you figure out your book’s topic/true north.

Create Your Outline

Here are the main steps I teach my coaching clients for creating an outline for a book that teaches:

1. Write down all of the topics you’d like to cover in your book. This is your chance to “free write.” What do you want to teach readers? What would you like them to learn or know from your book? Keep writing these down until you feel you’ve emptied out. Try to keep each entry to no more than one or two lines. For example, you might write: “Understand how to build a following on Instagram” or “Learn how to overcome their fears through meditation.”

2. Review your list, and check each one against your true north. If something doesn’t fit, put it in a separate list called “Strays.” If you don’t yet know your true north, see if one is presenting itself to you as you read your list. What is the central point of all of these topics? If you like your list more than your original true north, maybe you need to adjust the topic of your book at this point.

3. Review your list again, and for each entry, ask yourself: Is this a big topic? Can I write a lot on this subject — perhaps a whole chapter? If so, place a “B” next to it.

4. Place an “S” next to the remaining topics that don’t have a “B” next to them. These are your “sub-topics,” the subjects you don’t think you can write as much about. These will be within a chapter as a section that builds on one of the big topics.

5. Now, pull out all of the “B” topics into their own list and all of the “S” topics into their own list. Look at your “S” topics, and see if you can figure out which chapter each falls within — i.e., which “B” topic does it relate to? Move the “S” topics under their appropriate “B” topics. For those “S” topics you aren’t sure about, place them in the “Strays” list.

6. If you have to concede that some of your Strays aren’t pointing toward your true north, draw a line through them, as you’ll probably have to save them for an article or another book in the future.

7. Finally, look at all of your “B” topics with their own “S” topics, and begin to move them around until you have an order that makes sense to you. Just do the best you can with this, as you can make adjustments to the order once you start writing the book.

There you have it — your preliminary outline! I do recommend that you add more detail to it, providing additional notes on the topics, including stories you might tell. But if you really don’t want to do that, you can work from the outline you’ve created simply from following this process.

Bear in mind, too, that besides the true north of your book, each chapter will have its own true north — the topic of the chapter. I’ve edited many books with chapter titles that the author has written and then forgotten about. Once they finish writing the chapter, the title no longer applies, but they’ve never been told to check. So the chapter title might promise something that the chapter doesn’t deliver. Just as each chapter must serve the true north of the book’s topic, make sure that everything within each chapter serves the topic and title of that chapter.

While you’ll no doubt make changes to your outline as you write your book, having this roadmap will prevent you from ending up with a big mess at the end that requires a crazy amount of editing.

So do yourself a favor: Write your outline. It will bring you a great deal of comfort during the writing process and help you finish with a manuscript that you can polish within a reasonable amount of time.

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