Behind-the-Scenes: Peek at the Outline for Burn Bright (Patreon)

We're back again with another little behind-the-scenes peek. This time, we're showing you a portion of our Outline for Burn Bright. We are not full-blown outliners. Meaning, when we write, usually this outline is being constructed after each chapter has been written. Only when we reach a midway point will we start plotting more chapters in advance of writing them.

As this universe has grown and we've added more and more bonus scenes, keeping outlines of the novels is imperative. We refer to them whenever we're writing bonuses, and each outline gets constructed during the actual writing of the novel.

Check out the first 15 chapters of our Burn Bright outline, and we'll break it all down for you afterward:

The Key

Funny enough, the key is a new addition to our outlining process ever since Nobody Like Us. We find it helpful when juggling multiple major arcs to have a key. We'll typically fill them in during certain sections of the novel where we're trying to ensure the pacing between the arcs is good. For Burn Bright, it meant we used the key more toward the middle and latter half. So that's why you only see it appear in Chapter 15 of this portion of the outline.

If we showed you Silver Sweet's outline, you'd see we did it way more in the beginning and held off on using the key for the mid-to-late portions of the novel, since we didn't feel like we needed it in the process for that book.

The "Proposed Outline"

At the very top, you'll see a light blue highlighted box that says "new proposed outline" -- this is because our first outline had an ending we didn't go with or write. (We don't remember what it was, just that our chapters were incredibly off and it was essentially the "wrong" outline because it had never been written that way.) What you're seeing is the new proposed outline and ultimately the correct outline. We ended up deleting the other outline because, as you can imagine, we kept getting mixed up between them while we were writing bonus scenes.

Dates & Time

We were not always this specific in our outlines, but once we began heavily writing bonus scenes in 2018, we knew we had to be in order to go into past chapters and adequately insert new scenes. We love that bonuses can exist within the landscape of the novels, so we pay close attention to where they would fall into place.

Text Beneath the Chapters

Chapter 17, what you're seeing is that one of us left the other one a note of what we'd essentially discussed together that would need to appear in the scene. We do this a lot where it doesn't have to be verbatim the quote (and typically isn't) but the outcome needs to be the same. In the final version, Charlie isn't as scathing as he doesn't sneer in her ear, and that's something we always give ourselves room to create in the moment for when we're writing. Like how the characters feel in the moment, what they're doing, what's going on around them. Some of this stuff is just much easier to do naturally than have planned out.

We've also likely given each other notes in certain chapters and deleted them later. We'll delete them so it's easier for us to navigate the outlines for when we're writing bonuses and there's not a wall of text sitting beneath each chapter.

Point of Views

We do like to list out the POVs for each chapter so we have a good sense if we've been staying too long in one for a section of the book. It's just easy for us to see it visually in the outline.

If you have any extra questions about our outlining process, let us know in the comments! We hope you enjoyed this little behind-the-scenes peek. Podcasts will be here before you know it, and you can expect the bonuses to come after them. We can't wait for all the big content that's going to drop for May 🩷

Thank you so much for your patience this month as well! It's been one of the busiest, most action-packed months out of the year for us since we're finishing Loathed Love and had a new release with Dangerously Ours, but all great things are to come here on Patreon!! We appreciate your support here so very much 🫂✨

xoxo Krista & Becca