I’ve been working on the outline for book two of my series. I wasn’t sure where it was going but I knew at a high level what I wanted the beginning and end to look like. The rest was filling in the middle with a bunch of cool ideas.

Since I’ve been reading I’ve been inspired by certain literary devices that authors use. In particular I was inspired by how a few other authors wrote their second books and used a device of telling their backstory at the same time they advance the main story line. They do this by switching the POV back and forth between the two.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery meant I wanted to try it myself. So, I took that literary device and applied it to my universe and my story. I used it to fill in details up to where book one starts and also advanced one of the main story lines.

What I like about it is that the reader fills in important blanks that explain the backstory in detail. They get this satisfaction while at the same time giving them a taste of where things are going in the future. It might take a few chapters to get them into that flow of POV shift but it can be really effective when pulled off.

Let’s hope I can pull it off.

I started by outlining all of the historical story lines. This had a bunch of people and places to take into consideration as it was spread over multiple generations. Once I had that roughly outlined, I took that number of chapters from the historical story line and worked to fit the current timeline story arc into that. I know that sounds painful but surprisingly, it wasn’t. After I knocked that out I then went back for another few passes and refined, cut, refined, and cleaned up the outline some more.

It’s close to final form. I want to let it sit for a few days and read it again to make sure it lines up across story arcs and everything flows nicely. I also want to pull out some key elements and try to lay them out on a visual outlining tool to check for holes. That shouldn’t take long though. Famous last words, right?

It’ll be interesting if this actually works out when I sit down and finally put prose to page. I’ll keep you updated.