How to write a story outline

Who. Not their age and job: what they want, and why they want it now and not last year. A protagonist without a desire is an extra with more lines.

What stops them. An obstacle that can’t be walked around. If the problem can be solved by talking about it, it isn’t a problem: it’s a misunderstanding.

The point of no return. The moment when going back stops being possible. Without it, the story is a series of things that happen.

How it ends. In full. The outline doesn’t keep professional readers in suspense: it saves that for the audience.

In the present tense and in the third person. No dialogue — at most one line, if it is the one that turns the story.

No technical directions: this is not the place for camera moves. And no promises about what the audience will feel: “a moving story” is not information, it’s a hope.

Write what can be seen and what happens. If something can’t be seen or heard, it doesn’t belong in the outline.

A summary instead of a story. A list of events in chronological order is not an outline: the chain of causes is missing.

A passive protagonist. If things happen to them and they react, for three pages, the reader has no reason to root for them.

Too many names. Eight characters don’t fit in three pages. Two do, maybe three.

The hidden ending. “I won’t say, so as not to spoil the surprise” almost always means there is no ending yet.

Read it aloud to someone who doesn’t know the story, then ask them to tell it back. Whatever gets lost along the way is what doesn’t work, and no critical reading will tell you better.

The other test: being able to say it in two sentences without using “and then”. If you need five “and then”s, the story is a string of episodes.