How to design your settings and write your overall outline

Author: 314 (Yang Chen)

After you confirm what genre and topic you wish to write about, it's now time for you as an author to design your settings and write the overall planned outline for your plot. As for why I'm putting these two elements together, that's because these two elements are deeply interconnected and inseparable.

When you're writing the overall outline, this is basically coming up with the story's plot. As you write the outline, what you're actually doing is fleshing out the details for your setting.

When you're writing a story, of course, you need to first consider where your story will happen, when it happens, who it happens to, and what type of person it happens to. As the story progresses, you also need to consider who the main character will meet in the story, what time and place he or she meets them at, along with who's stronger and who's weaker than the main character…

This is why by the time that you're finished with your overall outline, the world's background, various factions, levels, special abilities, treasures, all the important characters… and such settings will be naturally completed during the course of outlining.

The reverse is true as well. If you first work on designing the detailed settings instead, then you'll basically end up with an outline for the story's plot and how the main character grows over the story as well.

Of course, there's still some differences depending on which angle you start from. However, newcomer authors like you don't need to worry about this. You can simply create based on your personality and whatever you prefer. It doesn't matter whether you start from the settings or the outline. You can even do both at the same time.

For newcomer authors like you, there's only five points that are critically important for you to understand.

1. Having an overall outline isn't absolutely necessary, but having one is always better than not having one

Theoretically speaking, even if you didn't prepare an overall outline, it might not affect the progress of you writing your novel at all. There are some authors out there that simply write whatever comes into their mind and go with the flow.

Of course, this is all just a best-case scenario in theory. For the great majority of authors out there, once your story's plot exceeds your planned outline...

Your outline will help your story stay on track in the early stages, but once you reach the mid and late stages, all sorts of problems often appear, such as too many plotlines all at once, self-contradictory plotlines, or writer's block…

At such a time, authors will typically regret not creating a more detailed outline, but it's already too late now. Actually, overall outlines have more uses than you think.

Since webnovels are typically longer than normal novels, they take much longer to write as well. Typically, it takes an average author several months or even longer to finish writing everything in their overall outline. By the time that they're finish writing everything in their overall outline, most authors will have new ideas and insights into what they want to write. Once they combine their new ideas with their original outline, in a way, this gives them two sources of inspiration. It's basically the equivalent of two people working together, and on top of that, these two people know exactly what each other are thinking.

It's easy to see how this can be helpful in improving the quality of your novel.

Apart from this, while creating an overall outline, the author can also discover many topics or problems with the settings and correct them in time.

To give an extreme example, if you're having a great difficulty with writing your overall outline and don't know what to do with your own plot, this proves that there's a large problem with your plot. You should either make major changes, or delete this part of your plot entirely.

So, newcomer authors definitely shouldn't overlook the uses of having an overall outline. No matter if you have a good or bad outline, a simple or a detailed one, as long as you have one, that's good.

What needs to be noted is that only outlines that have been written out truly count as outlines.

Even if you as an author have a very detailed outline, and even if you've solidly memorized every single plot point in your outline, any outline that hasn't been written into your novel doesn't count as a true outline. That's because when you actually start writing, you'll discover that what you finally end up writing will always have differences from what you envisioned.

2. You need to finish your outline, but it doesn't need to be complete

Thinking about your outline is equivalent to thinking about your novel's plot. You need to consider both the beginning and the end. You also need to think about everything that the main character experiences from the beginning to the end of the story.

If your outline isn't finished, but only half-finished, you won't even be able to predict the storylines that come later, which will cause you to have difficulties writing your plot once you finish the beginning stages. This is basically the same as not having an outline at all.

Still, there's no need for us to make the outline as detailed as possible from the very beginning, with so many specific scenarios for all your plots. The reason for this is quite simple—none of us know just how long our novels will turn out to be in the end.

A story that's written with the intent of becoming a commercial product needs to be sufficiently long enough right from the planning stage. The longer your potential story, the better. But actually, how many words it finally ends up with depends on how well your story performs.

If your story is incredibly popular and performs well in the market, then we can consider writing it for as long as possible. However, if your story obviously isn't popular with readers, then you can consider ending your story in a timely fashion at an appropriate point in the plot so that you can think of a new story instead. That would be a wiser decision if you wish to become a professional author.

Of course, when you're only in the outlining stage, it's impossible for you as a newcomer author to know how readers will react to your novel. Precisely because of this, you need to have a flexible writing plan. What this means is that you should have an outline that's detailed in the beginning and general near the end. For the beginning of your story, you should have as detailed an outline as possible, while for the middle and especially the later parts of your story, you only need some general ideas. All you need is to consider the overall development of the plot so that you know what direction to take your storyline in.

For example, maybe you planned that the beginning of your novel will be approximately 80,000 words, and you've prepared a 4,000-word outline for just the beginning. In that case, your outline for the next 80,000 words, the middle of your story, might only need 3000 words, and the meat of your story, another 240,000 words, might have an outline that's less than 1000 words.

Of course, as you continue writing your story, you should constantly update your outline as well. You should complete your outline for the next 80,000 words before you finish writing the first 80,000 words.

3. Your settings need to be constantly updated

Just like writing an outline, you should first come up with the basic settings before you even begin writing, which includes your world background, main character's personality, power levels, and so on.

More specific settings, such as a powerful artifact that appears in the story, can be added as you write your story.

Unlike an outline, you don't need to fully plan out all of your settings at the very beginning. It's perfectly acceptable to think of new settings while you're writing.

However, newcomer authors need to note that while it's okay to come up with new settings as you write, you should write these settings down and add them to your outline or settings document as you write.

This is to help yourself check your own settings later in the future. Otherwise, a novel that reached over one million words and has lasted for one year or longer might cause you as an author to completely forget about something you wrote before in the past. It's even quite common to make a mistake when writing about the items that the main character possesses. Yet, there will always be a sharp-eyed reader or two that catches the author out in a misstep.

If you have a very detailed document on your settings, not only will you be able to greatly reduce your own plot continuity errors, you'll also be able to look through your settings whenever you have writer's block and find some inspiration in a side character that you have already forgotten about or some item that was mentioned before but never used again.

4. It's better for your settings to be cliché

Here, this means the systems and names that you use for your settings. For example, the names and levels you use for a martial arts society.

Many newcomer authors will mistakenly think that using already existing well-known settings will make their novel seem too cliché, causing them to want to be as "unique" as possible. These authors will use their imaginations to come up with all sorts of fictional vocabulary words, which in their minds will make their novels "stand out." These newcomer authors don't realize that this is the worst possible way to write a novel. In the great majority of situations, this will have the opposite effect from intended.

A new original novel that you write should be a new interpretation or story about some specific genre or story type. How to make your novel stand out depends on the conflicts you create in your story and how the main character resolves them. As for coming up with new vocabulary words and names for your novel, even if you make them sound really cool, or make some modified slang words, it's almost never a good thing for you.

The reason for this can also be understood in my article about how to write the beginning of your story. By doing so, the author is placing more burden upon the readers to understand a larger amount of information.

There will always be other already existing words that you could have used, which are easily understood by all your readers. Instead, your readers now need to spend their time and effort on reading your explanations. Obviously, readers aren't here to read your technical manuals or info dumps. The more explanations that you have in your novel, the lower your novel's appeal and flow will become. But, if you don't add any explanations for your self-created words at all, the readers won't even understand what's going on.

This is why newcomer authors should avoid this useless type of "creativity" as much as possible. You should simply rely on settings that all readers are familiar with instead.

5. The storyline should be pushed forward by using conflicts

Many newcomer authors will often develop writer's block when planning their outline or working on their novel.

Sometimes, this is because the author has made their storyline too messy. But most of the time, it's because the author feels like there's nothing to write about, or doesn't know what they should make the main character do. The author has no idea how to continue their own story.

In order to deal with writer's block, or in other words, how to push your storyline alone, the answer is actually incredibly simple.

You can answer this question using only one word – Conflicts!

Actually, the critical element of all webnovels can be summed up into one word – conflicts. For example, leveling is the desire or need of the main character to become stronger, which is a conflict between the main character and his or her own current weakness.

And since there is a conflict, you must resolve the conflict. And so, your main character wants to cultivate to become stronger, which means he needs to travel around the world in order to find cultivation methods…

All sorts of conflicts will both push forward your storyline as well as create numerous climaxes for your readers. It can be said that how you design your conflicts is the very foundation of writing any novel, not just a webnovel.

As for a more detailed analysis on how to design your story's conflicts, please read my intermediate-level article on the topic. For newcomer authors like you, you simply need to understand this concept, and know that you should keep coming up with new conflicts whenever you're having trouble keeping up with your own storyline. Try finding potential conflicts from plots, characters, and items you've already used, or forcefully introduce a new element into your story that creates a new conflict.

This can be said to be one of the most basic techniques of planning your storyline.