If you're having problems outlining your first draft, it may be time to create a skeleton draft! In this article, we walk you through exactly how you can create your draft zero and plan your story.
There's simply no understating the importance of outlining your novel and crafting a first draft. While we completely understand the urge to just throw caution to the wind and jump straight into writing your first draft, outlining your story can make writing much easier and more efficient!
Plus, the outlining process doesn't need to be as tedious as you may think. There are many different ways to plan your novel — one of which is skeleton drafting!
Coined by Steffanie Holmes from Authors A.I. and best-selling romance writer Lucy Score, the skeleton drafting method is a pretty interesting way to craft your draft zero; the draft of your first draft.
So, let's explore how you can craft your own skeleton outline!
"This first step is about understanding what you’re trying to achieve so you don’t get sidetracked."
It's important to note that your skeleton draft will not be perfect and polished. Be prepared to have unfinished sentences and ideas or settings and characters that are unnamed and unpolished. The main point of your skeleton draft is for you to figure out the key events in your story and how they lead into one another.
This is also where we recommend finding a way for you to stay focused on your skeleton draft. This means handling any chores or responsibilities that may distract you and cleaning up your workspace.
You should also take this time to pick a playlist that works for you! We know just how long writers take to find the perfect tune to write to, but this simply takes up precious time that you should be using to draft your story.
It's time to build your skeleton! Steffanie and Lucy highlight the three main things you need to start writing your skeleton draft: A character, a hook, and an ending.
What it says on the tin. This is your protagonist; the character that will drive your story and stand out among your cast of characters. This, however, may change if you have multiple main characters in your story, like in Game of Thrones. For now though, let's work on the premise that your story only follows one protagonist.
In your skeleton draft, hold off on crafting a detailed character sheet about your protagonist for now. All you need is an idea of what they are like, their motivations and how they drive the story. Let's leave the physical descriptions and detailed backstories for another time.
It can be difficult to properly define what the hook of your story should be, but Steffanie and Lucy have defined it as "the spark that interested you in the story idea in the first place". It can be the main conflict of your novel, or the inciting incident of your story.
Let's use the Disney Classic, Mulan (1998), to illustrate this. The hook of Mulan would be the premise of the story and the inciting incident: Filial and brave Mulan masquerades as a male soldier to replace her ageing father in the army.
Don't be intimidated; you don't have to have a fully-fleshed out conclusion ready in your skeleton draft. All you need is a general idea of how your story will end, and not necessarily how your characters will get there.
Once again, using Mulan as an example, the ending could be succinctly summarized into: Mulan saves China. There is no need for any explanation about why, when or how she does so. If your story is a murder mystery, your story ending can be as simple as "the mystery gets solved". That's how general you can be in your skeleton draft!
On a digital writing app like JotterPad, you can draw up a table in your document to keep everything neat and organized for this step.
Now that you've got an idea of your main character and your hook, you're more than prepared to craft the beginning of your story. In fact, your hook should take place within the first 30 pages or so.
In Mulan, the beginning serves to introduce Mulan as a daughter that is unable to fit into the societal expectations of a perfect wife and daughter (as well as the iconic song Reflection), and also introduces the inciting incident: Mulan's ageing father has been drafted into the army. And this is where the hook comes in, where Mulan makes the decision to cut off her hair and replace her father in the army.
With JotterPad's cloud sync feature, you can open up your skeleton draft on your iPad and your note-taking document on your laptop. Both documents will then be saved to a cloud sync service of your choice!
We hope that this has been able to help you plan for your first draft!
