What is a Short Story Outline?

Plotting your short story can be an enormous challenge. You’ve had some time to begin developing your world and your characters, your moral gray area, and central conflicts, and now you face the daunting task of putting it all together into a coherent story—and making it interesting enough to get a reader hooked. This road map is otherwise called an outline.

A short story outline is a document that includes important planning information about your short story’s structure, plot, characters, scenes, and more. It is the skeleton of your short story. An outline can be anything from a one-page written document to a comprehensive visual mind map that uses diagrams to represent the link between information and ideas. If you have the space, you can write your sentences on index cards and post them on a wall to make it easier to view and manipulate the parts. Each event should be a single, short sentence (e.g. Danny gets shot in the leg).

Three Basic Needed in a Short Story Outline

Besides listing characters and plot points, your outline should give you a general sense of the direction of your story as well as the primary conflicts and tensions that will make it intriguing for readers. Keep the following questions in mind while creating your outline:

• What is the main contract of the story? You must resolve the promises you made to your reader by the end of the novel.
• What sort of time pressure is working on your characters?
• What is at stake for the protagonist of the novel? Does the pressure on the main characters grow more intense as the story progresses?

Sources: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-outline-your-novel#four-classic-methods-for-creating-novel-outlines