What Makes a Perfect Chapter Outline? | BookGo Fridays #21 ✨
Plus inspiration from the poets: Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Walt Whitman – Where does creativity come from? | And new books coming soon!
Hello all and happy Friday!
To kick off this issue, BookGo’s editorial wizard Nancy takes an in-depth look into how to write the perfect chapter outline. While it’s often something that writers overlook, the chapter outline is key to pitching and selling your book. As Nancy points out, if a book’s got a killer outline, it’s likely to be a goer. So read on to find out how to build out yours and get those editors and agents on your side.
And while you’re writing your book, we’ve also got some inspiration for you from some of the great authors of the past. First up, in our regular poem of the week, Tom takes a look at an uplifting poem from Walt Whitman, “Miracles.” And then, in the “Agony of Genius,” Michael muses over that most elusive of enigmas: the source of creativity. What was it that fueled Shakespeare’s sonnet-writing? Was it some divine inspiration or something altogether more earthly that set his mind ablaze?
As always, we’ve got so many things happening in the world of BookGo and beyond. So do like, share, subscribe, and stay tuned for exciting announcements about the new authors we’re working with and a range of incredible new books, from thrillers and mystery novels to memoirs and myths. There’s so much more to come!
Table of Contents
“Building a Brilliant Chapter Outline” by Nancy Merritt Bell
“Poem of the Week: Walt Whitman’s ‘Miracles’” by Tom Elliott
“The Agony of Genius: Where Does Creativity Come From?” by Michael McKinley
Building a Brilliant Chapter Outline
— By Nancy Merritt Bell
The brilliant chapter outline is a rare beast; it is the unicorn in the zoo of the book submission package. As I continue our Total Tour of the Submission Package, for me, when I read a brilliant chapter outline of a work of fiction, it dazzles and enchants. Every part of it I find unique and magical—and I want it. I want to publish it. Having sat on all sides of the submission desk, as writer, editor, and even as a reader, I don’t often see an excellent chapter outline—thus it is the unicorn. I’ve seen lots of charming cover letters, read loads of magical sample chapters, and great resumes—real and padded and not—and some very nice synopses. When I read a really great chapter outline, that project always goes forward.
Now, if you can answer the riddle of the chapter outline, you win the prize—and your book will get published.
What is the riddle? My best answer to identifying the riddle of the chapter outline is found by looking at its premise, at the very nature of the chapter outline. Chapter after chapter in paragraph form, in this traditional format, is set up to be boring! And so you, the writer, end up writing out your entire novel in a reductive form, of a paragraph per chapter, which more or less reads as “this happened and then this happened, and then this…” What was your amazing plot in your novel now plods along in the outline. Ultimately, your story dries out by the time you hit the outline’s finish line and write “The End.”
How to make this better? There are hundreds of online hacks offering “7 Steps to a Better Chapter Outline” as if it were a recovery program to a health issue and not a necessary and hellish writing pit. There are more than 7 steps: brilliance has many steps, plus there are handrails, carpeting, polished wood—you get the idea. You can lose a lot of shine and verve in your submission package and not ask enough of your own talent if you oversimplify what goes into a gripping chapter outline.
Steps aside, if I have a starting point in crafting a magnificent chapter outline, I would say first off, fight! Fight the tedium of the formulaic structure inherent in the chapter outline.
Begin your battle with the formula in your first chapter by opening up the world of your novel. Lay out your domain—without getting caught up in description—and put it in radiant terms and with a twist, if you can. If your novel is set in Stratford in 1584, as Maggie O’Farrell did in her astonishing book Hamnet, you focus on the natural world of the Bard’s future wife, Agnes–and don’t mention the name of that hot young tutor, who will become a famous playwright! Readers appreciate knowing your world, old or new or imaginary. It lets readers leap into the realm of your book and also it offers a kind of “what to expect”. It is from “the expected” that twists and plot turns and surprises spin and make a gripping story come to life.
Introduce your main characters early on and with gusto. Quickly lay out their flaws, strengths and contradictions. Their humanity and where they grow and go in your story is in what they lack as people. If at the start of your book, your main character is already in trouble—leaving a stale marriage or held at gunpoint—so much the better. The higher the stakes!
Follow up your reader’s meeting with your main players with your secondary characters. They might not need as much information and color and detail as your lead players, but be clear on how they relate to your main characters. And if you introduce your villain or antagonist first, that’s a gamble, but also an exciting play on the reader’s expectations of starting off with the hero, not the baddie.
By now you get the idea that laying out the first couple chapters in your outline can be tough. It is. That is why rewriting is essential to building a brilliant chapter outline, and why I use the word “building.” It is important not to think of the chapter outline as a boiled down version of your book. It becomes easy to get lost in the reduction process as you take dozens of pages of your novel and crush them into one paragraph. The thinking here, as you build your chapter outline, is all about your story, about beginning, middle and end, and then some.
In fact, it might work best to go back to the barebones of your story and build up from there. Start with three points, with your inciting event, then go on to your middle or crisis, and then climax. Next, go back and add in the rising action, complications, plot twists and non-twists (when characters are having a rethink, a revelation and or a re-evaluation of their situation) and the denouement. From there, you can see where exactly your chapters fall.
Not all your chapters in paragraph form will be juicy. But if a chapter in your outline runs thin—just two or three lines—your reader will be suspicious, and wonder if anything is happening here? Is this really a chapter, or is the writer vamping? Ask yourself if you are missing something storywise? If the chapter focuses on an internal change in your character—and the action is not large scale—go with it and give this engagement with the character the depth it needs. Use questions and even pull quotes from your book.
Be sure and highlight surprises and twists. Do it through your lead’s reaction: they are shocked, crushed, etc. You can also help draw out the plot twists by taking a line or two to describe the event, especially the climax, and sharing your vision of the scene. It could be a dark night in the woods as it was for the young heroes Jem and Scout when they were attacked in To Kill a Mocking Bird, or a stormy sea with a big white whale ramming a ship in Moby Dick. Now, when you get to the climax, don’t use the word “climax” or any other literary terms. It spoils the magic. You want your reader under the story’s spell, without spelling out how the charms or literary devices of your story work.
Brilliant chapter outlines are built: they come to life by rewriting and rewriting. As you revise, remember that language is key. Keep your vocabulary fresh, use lots of action words. Don’t be afraid to take a line or two—yes, a line is precious real estate in the chapter outline world--to describe a character, a feeling, or a change of season or place, even use a line or two or three of dialogue. It helps the reader see in the outline the book in its entirety coming alive. That is what the chapter outline is all about and why it is key to the submission package: it is proof there is a book here and that you know it and can write it.
Some of the best chapter outlines I’ve read, and loved and backed for publication, read like a very short story, one that is broken up into chapters. It is a quality to aim in your chapter outline, that it works as a standalone piece of literature. If your reader can’t put down your brilliant chapter outline, then your submission is well on the way to earning a great big green light and go on to the promised land: publication.
Poem for the Day: “Miracles” by Walt Whitman
By Tom Elliott
Sometimes at the end of another ordinary week in another ordinary year of my ordinary life, it’s possible and quite natural to forget the unfathomable, awe-inspiring miracle that it is to be alive.
That is what the title of Walt Whitman’s poem “Miracles” refers to. Whitman begins with a question: “Why, who makes much of a miracle?” In this, he draws our attention to the fact that we are accustomed to think of miracles as being somehow remote from us, even absent from our modern, rational, industrialized world. But the speaker of the poem immediately flips this on its head, reminding us of all the miracles there are to see in the supposedly ordinary, everyday world around us.
From the city “streets of Manhattan” out to the “trees in the wood,” there are miracles waiting for us everywhere, as long as our spirits and minds are open enough to receive them. The speaker does not describe the great acts of the gods—resurrections, plagues, or parted seas—but he enumerates an almost liturgical litany of the miraculous everyday.
Extended over line after line of non-rhyming free verse (making use of what we would technically call polysyndeton, parataxis, and anaphora), the poem has an all-encompassing sweep, seeming to spread out across all the lands and seas and encompass their vast and complex mysteries. At the same time, however, it also functions with the quiet, rhythmic repetitiveness of a prayer, said with the same care and deliberation of a monk with a Rosary.
Both grand and simple, high and low, it’s a poem that locates the divine within and not apart from life’s human comedy.
“Miracles”
By Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
“Where Does Creativity Come From?”
— By Michael McKinley
One of the questions that we all sometimes think about in this writing world is where does creativity come from?
Does it come from nature, or nurture? Does it come from someplace deep within our subconscious that would be a combination of the two, whereby ancestral genes duke it out with your own history to create a book, or play, or a piece of art, or a film or a song or a recipe or a big fat lie? Or, as a very entertaining piece I read recently in Literary Hub put it, might creativity come from chemical assistance? Might it have done so for the greatest writer in English who ever wrote? As the headline of author Sam Kelly’s piece asks, “Did Shakespeare write Hamlet while he was stoned?”
There is more care and concern these days about our mental health and about addiction. It’s always a worry for writers, ours being a solitary craft. But sometimes creativity demands a little boost, a little fun for our mental health.
The question about Shakespeare’s potentially altered state arises because pipes with cannabis residue were dug up in Shakespeare’s garden in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and scholars have pursued the idea that perhaps the Bard liked to enjoy a joint or two as he wrote. He certainly uses chemical assistance in his plays, with Puck putting “love juice” on the wrong lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, love juice that comes from a flower and is likely opium, while Othello also mentions opium, and Juliet drinks a sleeping potion that knocks her out for a couple of days so she can awake and be with Romeo. As the Lit Hub piece puts it, “basically, she roofies herself.”
Now, of course, this does not mean that Shakespeare was using drugs when he wrote any of his thirty-seven plays or one hundred and fifty four sonnets in a career that spanned twenty three years, and then nearly five centuries, as what Shakespeare wrote back then speaks to us still, and powerfully so.
But what if he was smoking pot and it fueled his creativity? Does that offer a recipe to us all, to fire up a joint, or pour a double, and set to work? If we do, can we be like Shakespeare? Well, again, we do not know if he was using drugs while writing, but scholars point to his Sonnet 76 as evidence that he may have been. This is it:
Sonnet 76: “Why is my Verse so Barren of New Pride”
By William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth and where they did proceed? O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument: So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.
In the sonnet, Shakespeare is asking what he can do to make his verse fresh and new. Would a “compound strange” help? Or perhaps a “noted weed”? Now if Shakespeare were using noted weeds or compounds strange to write his work, and if he admitted it, the Church of England would have pounced, as they were already suspicious of the moral worth of the theater and looking for ways to shut down that which they saw as filled with devils. So, despite the pot pipes in his garden and the reference to drugs in Shakespeare’s plays, we can consider his drug use all a glorious mystery to parse over a drink.
That said, for myself, my creative juices flow best when not impeded by any outside assistance, so I would not pour (I’m a liquid guy) a fat whiskey and get to work, especially since work sometimes starts before the sun is up. However, I might pour one after work and think about the stories I want to tell.
And so yes, chemicals can inspire your creative impulse. What you do with that impulse, and how you accompany it on its journey, is best decided by you. It can sometimes work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Xanadu was inspired by an opium fueled dream he had after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer capital of the Chinese dynasty founded by Kubla Khan. When Coleridge woke up, he started to write the lines of poetry that had swirled around in his dream-- and then he was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was "a person on business from Porlock". And that was the end of the poem because this interruption caused Coleridge to forget the lines in his dream. Even so, it’s still pretty good, and here are the first and last verses:
“Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea [...] A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
You might, before ingesting opium at bedtime, recall the words of another great altered state connoisseur, Ernest Hemingway, when it comes to helping your creativity along with a chemical nudge: “Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.”
All of which is to say that if you do write while enjoying the milk of Paradise, read over what you wrote in the sober light of day and see if it still works. If it does, and if it’s better than what you would have written while sober, then maybe you’re going to write the next Hamlet. And cheers to that.
That’s all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for more news about upcoming releases, reviews, and updates from BookGo and beyond. And have a lovely weekend!
The BookGo Team 💖