October Novel Prep Challenge

Love this!

Another one I highly recommend is six-stage story structure. Authors whose books tend to be deeply character-centric and who care about the story's characters and their arcs above all else might really love Michael Hauge's Six-Stage Story Structure   (and here's a video of the creator talking about it  ).

Michael Arndt's video-essay on writing endings   was a game-changer for me when it comes to outlining. It's not only about endings—it revolutionized my understanding of storytelling because it was a weirdly perfect fit for the way I thought about storytelling. It hinges almost wholly on the idea of identifying not only the external stakes for your characters (usually something like "survival" or "money" or some tangible win or loss/success or failure), their internal/emotional stakes (often something like love or belonging or respect from others or self-respect) and then the book's philosophical stakes, which he poses as a set of binaries—the idea of two competing value systems within a story (X versus Y: coercion vs cooperation, solitude vs community, holding on to painful experiences vs letting them go, etc.) And it's that last set of stakes that gives story meaning, he asserts. I thought it was a delightful video, anyway, and if no other outlining method works for you, maybe this way of thinking about story will give you the mental jumpstart you're looking for.

Like many outlining tools, the above two methods were originally crafted for screenplays but can be easily adapted for novels. Of all structures, I like those two the most because they focus on character and meaning/theme, both of which I find especially compelling as a reader (and writer)!