I kind of hate outlines...but I understand the necessity of them! For me, structure is one of the most important things to keep me calm and motivated, because I have a tendency to procrastinate and get anxious about pesky things like deadlines and getting things perfect the first time. One of my favorite articles is this one, even though it's about first drafts and not outlines. I try to read it every once in a while when I feel myself falling into the same routine of procrastinating because I want the perfect idea the first time. I'm still learning how to be okay with multiple drafts, so if you are writing a story or thinking about writing one, that article is a great one to help you feel okay if your story isn't perfect the first time around.
Anyway, I promised a rough outline for my story, so here you go. I've only gotten about four chapters kind of mapped out, but I plan on this book being at lease 20, so I'm okay with taking my time. There will inevitably be changes to this outline anyway. And that's okay. With anything that involves multiple iterations or drafts, you may feel like it's tedious and just want to skip to the perfect idea and the perfect draft. That's not how things work, unfortunately. Another thing I want to share is a character overview of my main character, Allie Daye. Try to ignore inconsistencies between the story expressed in the outline and in the character profile...it's evolving. I'm not sure which beginning I like better, so I used the outline to put down the first one that came to mind, which was similar to the beginning of the short story.
I hope you enjoy this look into my process! I'm definitely going to be sharing updated outlines and character profiles as they come, so look forward to that! I hope you all have a good week, and I'll see you all next Friday! Bye!
P.S. Here's a picture of what I imagine Allie to look like. The pic in the link is kind of small:
