Million Dollar Outlines

Book Description

Outline your novel for success, taught by a master writer and instructor.

Bestselling author David Farland taught dozens of writers who went on to staggering literary success, including such #1 New York Times Bestsellers as Brandon Mull (Fablehaven), Brandon Sanderson (Wheel of Time), James Dashner (The Maze Runner) and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight).

Dave was an award-winning, international best-selling author with over 50 novels in print, and a tireless mentor and instructor of new writers. His book Million Dollar Outlines is a seminal work teaching authors how to create a blueprint for a novel that can lead to bestseller success.

In this book, Dave teaches how to analyze an audience and outline a novel to appeal to a wide readership. The secrets found in his unconventional approach will help you understand why so many of his authors went on to prominence.

Dave passed away in January 2022, but WordFire Press is pleased to bring this vital resource back to a wider readership.

Million Dollar Outlines

Million Dollar Writing Series

David Farland

Million Dollar Outlines

by David Farland

Million Dollar Outlines

Copyright © 2014 David Farland

Originally published by DFE 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-61475-175-5

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61475-176-2

Cover design by Janet McDonald

Cover artwork images by Shutterstock

Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

Published by

WordFire Press, LLC

PO Box 1840

Monument CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press eBook Edition 2023

WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2023

Printed in the USA

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Contents

Quotes

Foreword

1. Overview: What Kind of Writer Are You?

2. Two Approaches to Storytelling

3. How this Manual is Organized

Step 1: Identify What Elements Make a Bestseller

1. Writing as a Form of Entertainment

2. What Is Story, and How Does It Work?

3. On Story Types Versus Shapes

4. Defining a Million Dollar Property

5. Audience Analysis: Film

6. Audience Analysis: Novels

7. Using Emotional Draws

8. Pulling It All Together

Step 2: Identify the Elements That Let You Plot a Story

9. Elements of a Story

10. Brainstorming Your Settings

11. Building Characters

12. Finding Themes in Your Tale

13. Novel Plotting Tools

Step 3: Learn the Plotting Process

14. Promising Starts to a Novel

15. Story Middles

16. Ending Your Story Well

17. Writing a Million Dollar Outline

18. Tips on Writing from an Outline

19. Exercises to Increase Productivity

About the Author

If You Liked Million Dollar Outlines…

Foreword

David Farland has trained dozens of New York Times bestselling authors over the years—people like Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), Brandon Sanderson (Wheel of Time), and Brandon Mull (Fablehaven) all came to him before they had ever sold a novel, then went on to make millions.

As a greenlighting analyst, David Farland worked helping with novels and films (as a consultant he urged Scholastic to push Harry Potter big, long before they were willing to do so).

And as a videogame designer he helped create stellar games like StarCraft: Brood War.

Eventually, people began asking him to teach a class on how to integrate high-level audience analysis into the design of a new intellectual property—a book or movie—and his popular writing course Million Dollar Outlines was born.

This book was used during the course as a reference, a refresher for many of the main ideas. Hopefully it will help you learn not just how to outline, but how to begin tweaking your work in major intellectual properties before you ever begin writing.

Dave passed away in January 2022, but WordFire Press is pleased to bring this vital resource back to a wider readership.

Overview: What Kind of Writer Are You?

Let’s face it: there are a lot of places where you can learn to outline a story. I’ve read books on the topic, studied card systems used in Hollywood, and even computer programs that can all teach you how to outline well.

In fact, I bought a program recently for $70 that did a pretty decent job of teaching you how to create a good working outline—but only if you wanted to write a hero journey story. It wasn’t much help in writing romances or comedies or several other types of tales.

So this book can help you to outline any story, but more importantly it also seeks to explain to you why some story ideas are better than others. Why do some ideas electrify wide audiences while others leave readers scratching their collective heads? How can you tell the difference so that you don’t waste your time writing a book or screenplay that has an audience of just one?

To understand this, I need to get into the basic psychology of storytelling, taking you much deeper than your average how to manual or software does.

This requires that you first learn what constitutes a potential bestseller, recognize the qualities of a good story, and then learn how to outline it in such a way as to bring out the best in it.

So, long before we ever talk about outlining, we’re going to spend dozens of pages on audience analysis and story theory.

You may be wondering if this book is for you. I’ll be honest: maybe it isn’t. Read the next page to find out why.

Two Approaches to Storytelling

There are two major approaches for writing a story: discovery writing and outlining. Neither approach is completely right nor wrong, and most authors take a hybrid approach. So let’s discuss each approach, along with its strengths and pitfalls.

Discovery Writers

A discovery writer is one who likes to begin a story without really knowing where it will end. Stephen King is an excellent example of a discovery writer. Such writers enjoy the process of discovering the story as it unfolds. Often, a writer who is deeply involved in a novel will be writing about a character and suddenly recognize that unexpected things are happening: the killer in a mystery turns out to be the protagonist himself, or the hero actually fails in his quest.

Discovery writing is an excellent way to create stories that feel organic. Characters often tend to come out well-rounded in discovery stories, and settings come to life.

However, I’ve known countless discovery writers who have problems with weak middles and sluggish endings because they didn’t control where the story was going; or maybe the writer may take ages to write a novel because they end up following characters down blind alleys.

Very often in discovery novels, the focus on the primary character shifts from one protagonist to another over the course of the novel, or the major conflicts that the author started with aren’t the ones that get resolved. When this happens, the reader feels cheated because the author hasn’t kept the promises that were set up at the beginning of the tale.

Yet many authors find that extra enjoyment in taking this approach because the story always feels fresh, vital, and alive. It makes the crafting of the tale fun, in and of itself, so that regardless of whether the piece sells, the work is enjoyable. So if you love the process of crafting the tale, this might be your favorite mode of writing.

Just remember that not all projects can be written through the discovery method. I’ve created a number of novels for major franchises like Star Wars and The Mummy. Some of them have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. But franchise owners will insist on a beautiful outline before they greenlight a project.

If you are solidly in the camp of discovery writers, if you never want to learn to work in others’ franchises, then this book may be of no help to you at all. In working with writers, I find that about 10 percent of them fit into this category. You probably know who you are: you may be the kind of writer who likes to write what are called small stories, intimate tales based upon your own past, your own personal life. Or like Stephen King, maybe you just enjoy the process of discovery so much that it becomes your primary drive for writing. It becomes addictive.

If this describes you, don’t waste your time and money on this book.

Outline Writers

Outlining writers enjoy creating a story by considering how to develop an engrossing tale, told at a great pace, with jaw-dropping plot twists. For them, plot is often paramount. There are plenty of plotting writers on the bestseller lists—people like Kevin J. Anderson or Ken Follett. For outliners, the fun of writing often comes in the pre-writing phase, where they sit and think, Wouldn’t it be cool if …?

The strengths of outlining are numerous. It is often both easier and faster to draft a book or screenplay based upon an outline because you know exactly where the story is going. There are fewer pitfalls and temptations to rewrite, since you’re not following characters down blind alleys. Writing from an outline makes the author more productive.

Sometimes, big stories can be sold on the basis of an outline alone, so that the writer can get paid for doing his work well in advance. A proven writer can make deals for millions of dollars based upon an exciting outline.

The weakness of outlining is that for some authors the process of writing that first draft can begin to feel mechanical—as if it is too much like a regular day job. As a critic, I find that stories written from outlines can feel a bit thin, as if the characters and scenes exist only to forward the plot. So as a writer, you need to guard against that.

In other cases, the author is so excited to get the plot down on paper, that the prose itself is deficient. The character voices may be weak and unformed, the sentence structures hastily written and inelegant. In other words, the author is so excited about getting something on paper that he doesn’t give proper consideration as to his tale.

One other weakness of outlining is that once the outline is complete, the author may feel that the story has already been invented, and he no longer needs to write it. One writer in Hollywood was known for creating great plots, which he would tell his friends in bars or at dinner parties. But after he had perfected his tale through three or four tellings, he no longer felt the need to write it all—and thus would ignore it forever. He’d lost the excitement. His friends were always amazed at the number of great movies he created—none of which ever made it to a first draft.

But there are ways to combine the advantages of both approaches to writing.…

Taking a Middle Ground

Many authors will take a hybrid approach to writing, using some outlining methods but leaving themselves open to free-write.

For example, you might find that you can outline just the world for your story. Whether you set your tale in a fantasy world, or in twelfth century Germany, or in a far-future dystopia, the world is not likely to change. Yet your characters and societies and their resulting conflicts will all grow out of that world. So you can develop a wonderfully detailed milieu, with wars and major conflicts and maps and notes on various subcultures and political rivalries and religions—and even have a strong idea of where your story is going—yet you may choose to discover who your characters are. Or maybe as you sit and think about how to best describe that world, you’ll create elaborate set pieces of description, bringing your world to life more deeply than you anticipated, making new discoveries about it.

In short, you may outline much of the tale, but leave some parts to discover. Tolkien seemed to work this way, creating Middle-earth and some of his characters long before he wrote The Lord of the Rings.

I personally will often outline a novel in thirds—so that I know where I’m going with opening scenes, but then stop partway through to consider how to handle the next stage of a tale. I know from long experience that by the time that I reach the middle of my novel, I will have changed emphasis and direction often enough so that I will need to discover what happens next. I almost never give my themes any thought before I begin, and so I often discover the theme of my tales, and the controlling metaphors, as I write. All of which means that I don’t quite know how it will all end—not really.

In any case, any one of these approaches—discovery writing, outlining, or a hybrid approach—can work beautifully for a professional writer.

You as an author may need to discover through trial and error which technique you enjoy most.

So this book will teach you how to outline in an effort to increase your productivity and the value of your finished product, as well as to discover new revenue streams. More importantly, it strikes at how to recognize and develop those great ideas that form the core of a blockbuster intellectual property.

How this Manual is Organized

The process of inventing a novel doesn’t all occur in one neat little step.

Before you can outline a story, you need to brainstorm it. The brainstorming process is a creative one—a right-brain function that comes often over weeks and months as you think about what you’d like to write. You’ll get a flash of a scene that appears in your mind, like the piece to a jigsaw puzzle. Later you might come up with an intriguing idea for a character, or maybe a plot twist, and each of those are pieces to the puzzle, too.

Not all of the pieces that you find fit together neatly. It’s like that crate full of puzzles that my mother used to keep—with dozens of old puzzles all thrown together.

But eventually you find some that fit, and others you craft from scratch, and you begin putting each of these pieces together into a coherent story.

These images and twists and characters and events are the meat of your plot, and coming up with them may take weeks or months. In fact, you’ll keep getting new ideas as you write your novel or screenplay, and perhaps even long after. For example, twenty years ago I wrote a two-novel series with the books Serpent Catch and Path of the Hero. Last summer I woke up one night and realized that If I just added this scene, it would really smooth out the transition between those novels.

Of course, no one rewrites novels after twenty years. We have to get the book onto the shelves. The same is true with movies. There is a saying in Hollywood: Movies are never finished, just abandoned. Most filmmakers are editing their movie right up to within a day or two of its distribution.

So creating a strong outline is a process that often starts out strong, but really can take time. Revision of your story, even in outline form, is an important part of the creative process. A few years ago I was talking to Frank Frazetta, one of the greatest fantasy illustrators of all time. I was gazing at some of his paintings and noticed that they had changed subtly since they had been first published in the 1970s. I asked him about it, and he said, Oh, yes, I take them out every few months and work on them. I might put a new wash over sections to deepen and bring out the color, or I might add a few highlights or new details. After thirty years, he was still creating his paintings.

You’ll have the same urge to continue working on your outline, too. Try not to take too long in this process.

As you write the first draft, you’ll normally recognize weaknesses in your outline and correct them then. Don’t drag out the process for years.

But before you start your work, you need to get some basic ideas of what the shape of your story might be, who your characters are, what settings you want to describe, and so on.

While creating a story is a right-brain process, the act of outlining it in a logical fashion takes place in the left hemisphere of the brain.

Your goal then is to generate enough information in the creative half of your brain so that the logical portion of your mind can study the tale, recognize weaknesses, and make it strong enough to become a bestseller.

So our organization follows certain steps.

Step 1: Identify What Elements Make a Bestseller.

In the first section of this course, we’ll look at storytelling from a theoretical point of view, to try to understand how to tell stories that will please a wide audience. We’ll also study bestselling movies and books and find the characteristics that are common to bestsellers.

Step 2: Identify the Elements That Let You Plot a Story.

Most books and computer programs on plotting give you a general idea of how plots work. But in this book we get into much more detail. We don’t just study overall story shape or how to create character arcs, we get into how plotting devices can be used to bolster any plot and make your story more interesting.

Step 3: Learn the Plotting Process

As you study steps one and two, you will undoubtedly get more and more ideas about how to handle your own story. The puzzle pieces will begin to fit together. You’ll think about the basic shape and form of your story. You’ll consider how to develop try/fail cycles, and how you might use various plotting devices to strengthen the tale. So in this third step, we get into the thick of it and develop an outline.

This first draft of an outline begs to