Your About Statement and Manuscript Magic Outline

Manuscript Magic TM Your “About Statement” and Manuscript Magic Outline Are you ready to start editing?   Choose a story to outline. It can be a full novel, a short story, or a picture book. If you’re still finishing the first draft of your story but want to practice outlining, use a favorite published book. This kind of outline is a fantastic way to get a deeper understanding of how your favorite stories are structured and paced. As you create your outline, feel free to adapt the format described in the video as needed. The goal is to create something that makes it easy for you to look over the scene summaries and see the big picture of your story.   You can do this in Word, Excel, timeline software, Scrivener’s corkboard, mind-mapping software, index cards – whatever works for you. Here are the steps for this section: Step 1: Create your About Statement. Write a one-sentence description of what your story is about. (Example: This story is about a young woman learning the true meaning of the word “family” while searching for her biological mother.) Step 2: Turn the About Statement into a question (called the Story Question). (Example: When a young woman searches for her biological mother, will she learn the true meaning of the word “family?”) The reader should know the answer to this question by the end of your story. Step 3: Read through your manuscript, doing your best to see it as if you are reading it for the first time. As you read you’ll be creating your Manuscript Magic outline. The outline can take any form you’d like, but we recommend it include these things: Scene Number (number your scenes consecutively from the beginning of the manuscript to the end). Manuscript page number or chapter number where the scene is located (useful for manuscripts longer than picture books or short stories). One-sentence description of the main event or conflict of the scene. Copyright © 2017, CBI, LLC. Not to be reproduced, redistributed, or retransmitted in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Your About Statement and Manuscript Magic Outline Type of scene (dialogue, action, character development, etc.) The scene may have several of these elements, but choose one word that best describes the type of scene it is, or the main purpose of the scene. If you notice something about the scene that you think should be changed, jot a note about it after the scene summary, but don’t do any revisions yet. Step 4: Review your completed outline, giving you a bird’s eye view of your story. Then create a new About Statement. Is this new statement different from your About Statement from Step 1? If it’s different, turn your new About Statement into a Story Question, as you did in Step 2. Is this new Story Question the one that gets answered for the reader at the end of your book? If you find your manuscript actually had a different About Statement and Story Question than you originally thought, that’s fine. Just make a note of the new About Statement/ Story Question for now. Step 5: As you review your outline, note if the plot of your story took a direction you didn’t intend, or you added characters or sub-plots that weren’t in your original vision. Just make some notes and pay special attention to these areas as you go through the editing process.   If your story ended up having a broad theme or meaning you didn’t plan, you may need to do some story-level revisions. For example, you thought you were writing a young adult novel about a teen establishing his identity apart from his twin brother, but your outline shows the primary focus of your book as a story about a white teen shedding his parents’ racist beliefs and forging a friendship with a Muslim girl. If your actual story is vastly different from what you thought you were writing, you have two choices: Do you want to figure out how to bring the story back to your original vision? Or do you want to reshape it to fit the new vision? Think about the pros and cons of each choice, considering the target audience for your book, how you feel about this new theme, and which vision (your original or this new vision) excites you the most. The vision you choose will determine the editing decisions you make as you work through Manuscript Magic. 2