I thought some of you might find my outlining technique interesting, or even useful. I use openoffice, which is a free office suite, similar to Microsoft’s. I really like it, and the word processor is terrific.

As you know, I’ve been outlining the novel, and I’m finding it much easier to do the outlining right in the text of the document. I put in four things at the top of each scene, much like you would a chapter heading. Each is prefaced by a letter to remind me what it is (in case I have a severe brain fart…)

S: summary of the scene

C: the major conflict in the scene (or lack thereof)

N: notes of things to fix, general impressions, etc.

E: how does the scene end, and whether it works

Each of these gets a heading 1, 2, 3, 4 style, respectively. To do that in OpenOffice, highlight the text you want to label, and then choose the style you want. That should already be in the menu bar at the top.

Next, create a table of contents (Insert > Indexes and Tables) at the very front of your document. On the first tab (Index/Table), you’ll click the button next to “additional styles” and arrange your headings as you want them to appear. I have mine indented much like you would for an outline.
Click okay, and the Table of contents should appear. Any time you want to update it, just right click in the table and select “update.”

One very cool thing you can do is put the body text into the table of contents too (using the “additional styles” button).

Finally, to get the table of contents converted to something editable, copy and paste it out to a new document. You’ll keep the formatting, but it will no longer be attached to the document.

So far, it’s working well for me. I haven’t tried this in MS Word, but you can probably do something similar there as well. I’m not sure though that Word will let you put the body text in a table of contents though.

I’m off to keep on editing. I have another short story stirring around that I’m planning on putting on the site as a pdf. No promises on when that will happen, but I’m working on it.