How To Outline Your Nonfiction Book: From Blank Page To Detailed Outline In Just A Few Hours

It all started when I was doing work-for-hire nonfiction writing projects. The publisher would send me a detailed outline (or template), so I could write a book to add to one of their existing series. This served their purpose of having a catalog of books that had the same set-up, tone, and format.

As the writer, this prevented writer’s block, veering off-topic, and created direction. All-in-all this was a wonderful process. As a future author of my own series, creating an outline taught me a few things:

• A book outline with headings and sub-headings makes the book writing process faster and easier.

• It sets up a system for collecting research, stories, and information.

• It helps the author identify the transformational experience (or solution) they are providing the reader.

For example, with my young adult nonfiction book, Ignite Your Spark: Discovering Who You Are From the Inside Out, I take the reader on a journey of self-discovery where they are able to identify who they are through quizzes, activities, information, and interviews. My initial outline created the roadmap to take them from Point A (Chapter 1) to Point B (the last chapter). Because of the outline, I always knew what tools I needed to give my reader, so they could reach their destination.

THE OUTLINING PROCESS

Mind map your book idea.

This is the great big brain dump you are going to do in order to get your creative juices flowing. The goal of a mind map is for you to quickly organize your ideas while making secondary connections i.e. your headings and subheadings for your book. Let the ideas flow quickly. Don’t spend a lot of time editing your mind map. You want to capture all of your thoughts right now. Feel free to work on this in spurts, because new ideas and word associations will come up after you’ve given yourself some time to think. 

Organize your ideas.

Now that you’ve got this crazy-looking mind map with notes all over the place, you need to organize the information. The easiest way to do this (for me) is with a pad of 2 different colors of Post-It notes.

Designate one color for chapters (or subtopics), and the other color for sub-sub topics. As a reminder from my article about mind mapping, here’s where your topics, subtopics, and sub-sub topics are on your mind map.

 Grab your Post-It pad color for subtopics. Write down every subtopic you came up with from your mind map on a separate Post-It sheet. You should have 7 – 12 of these subtopics.

Using Post-It notes allows you to move things around until you get them in the most logical order. You can do this on your desk, the back of a door, or on a poster-board … wherever you have enough space to see everything.

These subtopics are your book’s chapter headings. Don’t worry about the actual wording for your chapter just yet. Right now, we’re grouping information.

Now get your 2nd color of Post-It notes. These are for your sub-sub topics, which are the different sections within your chapters.

Create a separate note for each one of these and place it under the correct chapter heading or subtopic.

For example, in my book Ignite Your Spark, my Post-Its for the chapter on failure looked like this:

Post-It #1: Teen story

Post-It #2: Don’t be afraid to try

Post-It #3: Define resilience

Post-It #4: Self-assessment quiz

Post-It #5: Teen interview (success story)

Post-It #6: Epic fails in history

Post-It #7: Expert interview

Post-It #8: Prepare to fail

Post-It #9: Activity-Based on this example, you can see how much easier it was to write this chapter once I had all of the subheadings created.

Create your logline.

A logline is really important. This is the 1 – 3 sentence description of your book. We’ll use my latest book Momentum: Take Your Life Out Of Neutral and Drive Into Your Purpose as an example.

The logline is: Daily practices to help the reader build personal and professional momentum in their life. The reader will learn to balance their day with rejuvenation, setting intentions, creating courage, and spiritual practices.

Your logline will help add direction to your writing. Look over the Post-It note outline you’ve created and start brainstorming your logline. The exact wording of this elevator pitch can change before you start using it for promotional purposes. For now, this is your reference point for the topic of your book.

Make it official.

By now, you should have a mind map, a summary of your book topic (logline), and a whole bunch of Post-It notes stuck to a wall or table. Now you need to get all of this into some sort of usable format. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, because some of these options warrant their own blog post. Here are a few choices to get you started:

• Create a Google Doc. A huge benefit to using this over a traditional word-processing program is the outline feature. That’s because it creates a panel to the left of your document with all of your headings and subheadings that are clickable. This allows you to skip around within your document very easily. It’s great for someone who may not be writing the book in order, but working on different sections.

• Evernote. This program that you can use on your phone and computer lets you capture ideas, research, and notes using its digital file structure. You can create a notebook for each chapter and add your writing and ideas all in one place. This is a wonderful option if your book has a lot of research, website information, or document gathering (interviews).

• Word or Pages. Set up your favorite word-processing software with your new outline. Just make sure you have a great back-up system like the Cloud or Dropbox. You never know when a nasty virus or computer crash can hit.

Say goodbye to writer’s block.

There’s nothing like a bad case of writer’s block to ruin your mojo for a new book project. Who wants to stare at a blank screen?

With your new nonfiction book outline, you should never face that problem again. My favorite part of having an outline is the ability to skip around.

Sometimes, I’m not in the mood to write what comes sequentially next, so I move on to another section. One of my books included a quiz, activity, and story in every chapter, so I would batch those sections.

On Mondays, I might work on quizzes … Tuesdays on activities … and so on. This helped me to write faster because I was in the zone of working on one particular section. You might give it a shot if you have repetitive sections.

Just a special note before we go, there are so many considerations to make when starting your book writing project. One of the most important topics for nonfiction writers to address is their promise to the reader. In an upcoming post, I will discuss how you can create a transformational experience for your reader and turn them into raving fans.