When I start writing a new book, I sometimes write an outline right away. Other times, like with Lessons, I write a little bit of the book (the first 2000-10,000 words) and then go back and outline what I wrote before outlining the rest. Without outlines, I wouldn’t have finished most of my fiction over the past few years.

Books are long. A book isn’t considered a book until it gets to around 60,000 words (unless you’re writing for kids, in which case the rules are different). The first book I ever completed was just a little longer than that, even after I padded out the ending with the main character’s origin story as a little bonus piece. I didn’t outline that book at all; I just had a vague idea where it was going to go and what was going to be involved. Had I outlined the book, I would’ve at least had a roadmap of sorts. I did know from the beginning how I wanted the climax to go — with the female lead shooting the main villain in the head — but there was a lot of meandering to get there, including a pretty pointless “action-adventure” trip to Indiana (the book took place in Florida), to ostensibly pick up some secret material or somesuch. I don’t know anymore; it’s been a long time since I read that one (because it sucked so bad).

Outlines keep you on track. A few years ago year I found two novels on an old USB drive, both of which were 80,000 words or so in, both of which were incomplete. The first one was a MG/YA novel about a girl who finds a magic book in a grandfather clock, changes the fabric of the universe (by accident), and has to learn how to use magic so she can get home. I got as far as “the girl meets the Wise Old Man Character” and then stopped, because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. This book started writing itself more than fifteen years ago, but it petered out because, as I said, I had no idea where I was going. I could tell that was the case, though, even as I got through the last 10,000 words while I was rereading it. There were more tropes, more cliches, and more things that the main character didn’t understand which were hand-waved away. Even the writing started to seem stilted, as if I was trying to figure out what was going on. I had set up the journey, but I had no map, and to this day that story remains lost in the desert.

Endings are visible. The other book mentioned in the previous paragraph actually does have an outline, and I happen to think it’s a good one. The problem is this: I didn’t write the outline until I got to the second-to-last completed chapter. That was the point where my characters had formed the adventuring party and departed the main town to escape the villain. When I got there, I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to happen next, so I stopped writing the book and started writing the outline. The outline for this particular book is about ten pages long, and I pretty much wrote the entire climactic scene, sans dialogue. I know it’s going to take me at least 100,000 more words to get there (this is a high fantasy novel), but at least I know how it ends… and how much I’m going to love seeing it written out in its entirety once I get there. Someday. Maybe.

There’s no format. I’m sure in school you learned to write an outline with Roman numerals, capital letters, regular numbers, lowercase letters, and lowercase Roman numerals. I still use that format today when writing step-by-step documentation. But that kind of outline isn’t always the best type for fiction writers. Which is why it’s great that, as a writer, you can use whatever outline style you like. For my novels, I outline in paragraphs — usually one five-to-twenty-line paragraph per chapter. I have, in the past, outlined with Roman numerals (back when I thought I could write a Star Trek tie-in novel; silly little 12-year-old me). I know one writer who uses the tree format. Others, like Laurell K. Hamilton, put the contents of the book on the wall, written on sticky notes. And, if you really want to get technical, software like Scrivener is extremely popular. I personally don’t use it (I prefer Google Docs), but I can see its benefit.

You are here. In my paragraph outline style, I have a very simple way of knowing where I left off: as I write a plot point and come to the end of a scene, I highlight that part of the outline in purple. It’s quite easy to find my place that way, because I don’t even have to read. I just scroll until I get there. Now, admittedly, when I’m at the beginning of a story, and I have a dozen or more pages to go, it can seem daunting, but just remember how one eats an elephant. You don’t have to mark off your outline like I do, but it helps to see tangible progress on your master document. Trust me.

It’s not set in stone. While writing an outline can keep you on track, help you determine major scenes and signposts in your story, and even assist you in breaking up your sections into manageable chunks, ultimately it’s just a map. Have you looked at a map lately? No, of course you haven’t; your phone has a GPS on it. But pull up a map and see if you can count how many different ways you can get from New York to Los Angeles. Maybe you go across the country diagonally, including I-44. Maybe you head down to Atlanta and then west on I-10. Maybe you hit Chicago and Denver. Or maybe you decide when you get to Pittsburgh that where you really wanted to go was Canada. The point is, you’ll still get where you’re going, eventually. Realistically, that doesn’t happen too often. When you write an outline, you tend to stick with it. But you might change the order of things, or decide that a subplot needs to go, or add in something you forgot along the way. You can change your outline — annotate your map, to continue the metaphor — as often as you like. You can even scrap it and go back to the start. But just having it is comforting, and although I used to hate the very idea of outlining, I now appreciate it and use it whenever I can.