You need to include anything that helps you write your novel in your story outline. This includes details about who your characters are, how their actions drive the plot forward, and every fact you base your story on. Your story outline exists for your own use, and you can structure it in any way you like and can understand. In this article, we explore some crucial aspects of your story which your outline should address.

Achieving Your Creative Goals

There are various themes you may want your romance narrative to explore, specific goals you hope it achieves, and aspects of your characters you want to evoke. With your outline, you can experiment with these goals and find better ways to structure your plot to achieve them without writing the entire narrative as an experiment. Your outline allows you to find out what works best for your story and what doesn’t work, even before writing.

Answering Every Question

There are questions about your characters' dispositions and actions that your story is bound to raise. Why do your characters act the way they do? What brought them into the predicament that you have given to them? Are your hero and heroine’s responses reasonable? Are other characters expressing sensible reactions to your hero and heroine? Have you checked and double-checked all the facts your story relies on? Are you sure you haven’t contradicted yourself unknowingly somewhere along the way? You need to address these questions in your outline so that the chances of them becoming a problem when you’re done writing would be slim. You need to question everything because a minor detail that's out of place can be enough to put your readers off. They need to have reasonable, satisfactory answers to every question your narrative raises. 

Ensuring Logicality

Like every other work of fiction, romances need to comply with the laws of logic. Even when most of your plot elements and setting are fictitious, readers need to believe the reality of the story world from beginning to end. As you write your outline, follow the rules of the fictional world your story occurs in. Considering the possibility of events at the outline writing stage will prevent your narrative from sounding absurd and unrealistic when getting down to writing it out. You need to set the parameters of your fictional world so that everything that goes on within it will make sense, or else readers’ trust and engagement may get lost before your story takes off or halfway through your book. 

Making the Characters Central

Your outline, as well as your story, should revolve around your main characters. Let their choices and decisions drive your narrative. You need to put your characters in mind when you draft your outline. Consider their needs and personalities, and let that guide your story forward. Let your outline showcase how the choices of each character affect the plot, as well as how they react to the events that occur in each scene. This way, when you write out your narrative, you show readers real characters affected by their decisions the same way real people do.

Gathering the Necessary Facts

It's essential to get all the facts of your story straight before the writing process begins. It helps that your creative process doesn't get interrupted by the need to research some facts related to your narrative. The best way to reduce the rate of this interruption is by considering it when writing your outline. In your story outline, consider all the facts of your story and ensure they are handy when you need them and already correlate with the events in your narrative. As you write your outline, think of your book on every level. Consider the factual questions it needs and provide answers to them.