I’ve been wanting to complete a novel for a while, and well, I have a lot of ABDL kink stories on my computer, some of them somewhat lengthy, like 20,000 words or more, and I think I could actually turn one or two of them into a genuine self-published novel on Amazon or something if I had a good outline.
I have a habit of just writing stories when I feel like it, and outlines usually get in the way for the zero draft, but they come in handy as I go back and refine the idea. I can’t write my own outlines, though, at least not effective ones. I’d like to learn how. I feel like publishing something, even if it’s smut, would enhance my confidence as a writer and maybe even teach me some useful skills.
There are a few cool programs that you can use to help outline a story.
Miro is a cool white board program where you can make mind maps and have things all connect and is very handy for getting ideas down and looking at how they connect to your story. you can get a free account at miro.com which is fine for personal use. I use it in work all the time and you would only need to pay for it if you have a team of people working with you.
Then there are some cool writing programs like ywriter or scrivener. They let you organise everything in your story and choose what is actually going into the story and what stays in the story and what is just a note. Scrivener is about 40 bucks if I remember correctly while ywriter is free.
Then if you are looking for courses on outlining stories I would say check out Udemy. They have a weird model on selling courses so when you look at the courses they will be a couple of hundread bucks but if you wishlist what you are looking for and wait a few days you will normaly get a discount that will bring the cost down to about 10 bucks. I have a dozen or so courses with them and I dont think I have spent more than 15 bucks on a course despite the average rrp being $300