Outlining Your Novel Box Set: How to Write Your Best Book

by K.M. Weiland

2 Bestselling Guides Packed With Tips to Help You Brainstorm and Plan Your Best StoryFrom Award-Winning and Internationally-Published Writing Mentor K.M. Weiland

With over 300 pages of step-by-step guidance, these two individual books have 2,500+ five-star ratings on Amazon and have helped thousands of authors write better books.

Can Outlining Help You Write a Better Story?

These bestselling guides will help you choose the right type of outline to unleash your creativity, guide you in brainstorming plot ideas, and aid you in discovering your characters.

--OUTLINING YOUR NOVEL--

Award-winning author K.M. Weiland’s bestselling Outlining Your Novel shows you how to embrace outlines in a way that makes the writing process fun, inspiring, and easy.

Writers often look upon outlines with fear and trembling. But when properly understood and correctly wielded, the outline is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer’s arsenal.

Outlining Your Map Your Way to Success will help you choose the right type of outline for you, guide you in brainstorming plot ideas, aid you in discovering your characters, show you how to structure your scenes, explain how to format your finished outline, instruct you in how to use your outline when writing the first draft, reveal the benefits of outlining, and dispel the misconceptions.

--OUTLINING YOUR NOVEL WORKBOOK—

Now it’s time to put those lessons to use! The Outlining Your Novel Workbook presents a guided approach to getting the bones of your story down on paper, identifying plot holes, and brainstorming exciting new possibilities.

Containing hundreds of incisive questions and imagination-revving exercises, this valuable resource will show you how

Create your own personalized outlining processBrainstorm premise and plot ideasDiscover your charactersChoose and create the right settingsOrganize your scenesAnd so much more!This accessible and streamlined workbook will empower you to create a powerful outline—and an outstanding novel.

Start writing your best book today!

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference, How To

252 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 11, 2016

About the author

K.M. Weiland is the award-winning and internationally published author of acclaimed writing guides such as Structuring Your Novel, Creating Character Arcs, and Writing Archetypal Character Arcs. She writes historical and speculative fiction and mentors authors on her award-winning website Helping Writers Become Authors.

Reviews

[Ashley Stangl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this hoping to gain some new outlining techniques to use on a story that crashed and burned. Found out that most of the suggested techniques were the ones that had led to my story's failure in the first place. Much of the outlining advice was maddeningly vague, and some of the steps were arranged in ways that made no sense to me. (Start making a list of "what if" questions about your premise....and then figure out what the premise is?). I might try some of the techniques listed or make use of some portions of the workbook (especially the character motivation portions, which actually helped highlight some issues in my failed story), but the big, complicated, insanely detailed process described in these books is absolutely destructive to my own creativity.

[Naomi Bowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love K.M Weiland's books. Her fiction is excellent but her non-fiction on writing is also fun and easy to read.

This book was really helpful in developing a story idea I've had for ages. I feel I'm a lot closer to that first draft now.

The outling process Weiland recommends is extensive- some might say a little daunting - but I think it reminds you how fun writing and creating worlds and characters can be.

I guess my only criticism would be that some questions are vague and seem a little pointless. A dictionary of her terms might have been helpful. Also, get this in paperback. It harder to do the jumping between the book and the workbook this box set requires in Kindle format.

But overall, a thorough and helpful guide for new writers.

[Attila · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s an interesting read, but I felt there was a lot of fluff.

Particularly the author interviews between chapters felt unnecessary, and felt to me as a way to fill up the pages. The workbook part was basically just a big questionnaire, which can come in handy as a reference. There are however valuable lessons to be learned, especially if you haven’t read any books about writing before. The biggest lesson for me was to not hold on to a defined structure, but rather dump ideas onto a page, and order them later on. All in all I recommend it for a leisurely read, but if you want a more structured way of learning about story writing, I would recommend The Anatomy of Story by John Truby (the author also references that book), but both works can go hand in hand.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used both the book and its workbook to outline my current work in progress and I found the system proposed amazing! It takes a lot of work, it's true, but it's completely worth it. At the end of the outlining process, I had such a deeper knowledge of my characters, my setting, my background and my story, I couldn't have gained it otherwise.
Everyone can (or probably should) make adjustments to the outlining process but this is a great point to start from.

[Mark Durocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great step forward for Outlining!

I like that this book explains writing an Outline is optional, but very well needed if you want to glide through writing your book at a faster pace. I will use this to write my first story to publish. I chose this rating because of all the questions the writer gave us to answer, and I will be using to questions to Outline my story before I start writing.

[Margaretha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great resource for writers.

[Roberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schon seit einiger Zeit mache ich mir bei meinen Schreibprojekten Gedanken über Aufbau und Charaktere, bevor ich mit dem eigentlichen Schreiben beginne, trotzdem war ich mir nicht wirklich bewusst, inwieweit mir diese Vorarbeit hilft. In diesem Doppelwerk werden die Vorteile einer ausgiebigen Outline nachvollziehbar dargelegt und mit zahlreichen Beispielen unterlegt. Zudem werden zwischen den Kapiteln verschiedene Autoren dazu befragt, wie sie mit Outlines umgehen. Natürlich sind nicht alle Anregungen für jeden Schreiber anwendbar, grundsätzlich sind jedoch viele Ideen enthalten, die zu einer Outline führen, die das Schreiben um einiges erleichtert, die Tätigkeit selbst aber nichts an ihrer Freiheit einbüßt. Den zweiten Part fand ich im Vergleich etwas schwach. Zwar soll dieser eine Art Gerüst zur Hilfe einer kompletten Outline sein, nichtsdestotrotz schränkt er die künstlerische Arbeit doch zu stark ein.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This boxed set is fantastic for pantsers and planners alike! I learned that I could still be spontaneous in my writing while planning ahead a little bit. The great thing about this book set is that you can do as much or as little planning as you like and keep planning as you go along if you get stuck. The questions and exercises in the workbook are extremely helpful in getting an author thinking about the next steps necessary to move plot and character arcs along. I could read and reread these books for every project, and even more than once for each project. They are succinct, yet very informational. Highly recommended!