Now that I know the rules for this forum, I’ll try to talk a bit more about narrative outlines. 8)
First, for more information on narrative outlines, I strongly recommend the book, Writing the Blockbuster Novel, by Al Zuckerman. I write Thrillers, and have found outlining to be essential. I didn’t outline my first book and it caused me all sorts of trouble. There’s a constant debate in the industry between “pantsers” and “plotters” as to the best writing method, but I find most thriller writers are plotters and mystery writers can afford to write by the “seat of their pants.”
Why? Thrillers usually contain several plot lines, several points of view, escalating suspense, and complex story lines. Outlines help me in the creative process, and more importantly, help the editor to determine the gist of your story months before the final draft will be available. Since book catalogs must be printed, book covers designed, and salesmen briefed on the main theme of a story far in advance of the book release, the narrative outline provides an excellent “cliff notes” version of the story, for them to use.
Why present tense? Mainly a stylistic decision, but I think it just reads better for an editor. You’re basically telling a professional what you are GOING to write about, so it’s in the present and future. Future tense would be awkward, but present tense makes the story seem more immediate and gripping, IMHO.
Meanwhile, the book itself is basically a story being told by a narrator, (the author) about something that has already happened, hence the typical past tense.
My narrative outlines can typically reach 30-40 pages, so in Scrivener 1.9 I basically wrote them as chapters, one text file per chapter, about one or two paragraphs per chapter. The challenge came when I wanted to start fleshing out each chapter. Converting the existing present tense prose into past tense for the story, seldom works, because you’ll be writing in far greater detail and using a completely different approach to the chapter, so I seldom bother copying the outline text into the real chapter file. But I DO want to see and read the narrative outline while writing the actual chapter.
In 1.9, I used the first level of files under the “manuscript (draft)” folder as my narrative outline chapters, then used the second level of subfolder for the actual chapter. This was tedious because I then had to manually uncheck all the first level files from the compile window. Pretty messy.
3.0 offers so many other approaches, that should make this conversion process easier. I’m still developing a strategy, but suspect it will be something like this:
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Create a “outline” folder under “draft” and write the outline as usual, with subfolders as chapters. As noted in the tutorial thread I mentioned above, 3.0 allows you to compile separate folders under draft and treat it as the whole book.
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Compile the completed outline using its own custom compile format and send to editor.
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Create a new folder, “novel” at the same level as, and above, the “outline” folder to house the real novel. Create all the chapter subfolders under novel that correspond to the outline chapters.
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(probably) Bookmark the outline version of the chapter in the REAL novel chapter, then use the Copyholder or Quick Reference windows to view the outline chapter while I’m writing the real chapter.
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Compile the final book from the “novel” folder, without the need to manually uncheck folders.
I hope that is helpful and I would love to hear how other writers convert an outline to a finished book!