I’ve written about structure before, why we need it in our work and in our personal lives. So I’ll try to keep this one simple and practical and not wander too far into the land of the esoteric.
Structure gives a thing shape. It helps you understand what you’re doing. It limits you in the best way possible (we all need boundaries to keep us safe and to keep us focused).
Not all structures are created equal, but more than one will usually do. I often wrestle with my clients on this point. They tend to want to go back to the drawing board again and again before beginning to write. I discourage them from this practice. More often than not, it’s a stall tactic. The structure of the book is like any plan: it is not accurate, but it can be useful. Plans give us a goal to point to. They tell us where we are headed next and help us gauge our progress. They are a means to the end.
For a book, the structure is as simple as an outline, a table of contents.
When in doubt, pick a nice round number for how many chapters this book will have. Ten will probably do. Maybe twelve. Sometimes even twenty or thirty. Not sure how many you need? Go to a bookstore, find the section of the store where your genre is located.
Believe it or not, there are different kinds of books, and there are conventions for every type of book. The way a self-help book is structured is far different from how a fantasy novel is. Same goes for a how-to book on auto mechanics or a cookbook. Find your shelf, pull a few titles off, and flip through them. Find the Table of Contents at the beginning of the book, and take a photo of it with your phone. Flip through the pages, get a sense for how long each chapter tends to be. Is it ten pages? Twenty? More? Less?
This is structure. Every book has one, and usually the structure is both consistent with itself and with the norms and conventions of its genre. Meaning, most chapters within a given book are around the same length. And those chapter lengths (and the number of chapters) are often similar to the other books on that same shelf.
Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but there is always a rule. Try to find it. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Figure out how long the typical book in your “space” is, too. 150 pages? 200? 400? A simple Google search (or AI query) will tell you how many words are in a typical 300-page book. This is how you decide how long your book will be. How long are other books like yours? Where on that spectrum do you want to be? Don’t aim to be so unique that there is nothing like your book out there. That is a recipe for quickly being ignored.
If you want to innovate, pick something small, some small sub-category in which you choose to be unique. If everything about your book is different from what anyone else has ever done, you don’t have a book. You have a monstrosity. Save all your creativity for later.
For now, pick a simple format—a word count for the book, a number of chapters that makes sense, and an idea of how long each chapter will be.
For me, this is arbitrary. If I’m writing a business book, I’m aiming for something like 65,000 words, which is your typical 240-ish page hardcover. It might be 55,000, and it could be 70,000. But it’ll probably end up somewhere around that range.
How long do I want each chapter to be, and how many chapters should I have here? That depends on the type of book it is, but I almost always start with ten and see how that feels. If the book is 60,000 words, can I justify 6,000-word chapters, or will that alienate my audience?
Should I aim, instead, for something like twelve to fifteen and see what that gets me? What are other books about this topic doing? I’ll check out a few, even just look them up on Amazon and preview the book to see the table of contents.
You get the idea. You’re just picking a form, an empty space in which to create. If it’s too vast, that’s overwhelming. And if it’s too small, that can be constraining. Find the right frame for your art, and start painting.
So now you’ve got a word count (which will inform page length), a number of chapters you want, and an ideal average chapter length. Next you need the actual outline.
That’s easy. Just start a numbered list. Don’t worry about parts or sections yet; begin with the beginning. Do you need an Introduction? Probably. Maybe. Those are usually shorter than chapters, so start there. What is the big idea? What’s the problem you’re solving? That’s the Intro.
Then what next? Well, of course there’s wherever you begin in the process or story. That’s Chapter 1. Then there’s what comes next, what loop opens up after you’ve closed the loop for Chapter 1. That’s Chapter 2.
And on and on you go.
If this sounds flippant, like it’s too easy and not that well thought-through, that’s because it is. Don’t overthink this. It’s a plan, a model. It’s wrong already. It’ll change immediately. But it’s something to get you started, a structure that will help you start. You can iterate as you go, but try to make sure it at least makes sense to you now.
Write down all the chapter titles, then write a paragraph or two on what is actually going into the chapter. Outline the chapter itself. What stories will you tell? What ideas will you share? What do you want the reader to get out of this?
Then move on to the next one. Make sure you don’t repeat themes. Doing this—annotating an outline—will help you see how much material you actually have on hand and therefore how much more research you might need to do.
So you keep going.
If you run into a block, give yourself a cue, something like “STORY TK” to indicate you’ll add a story there later (TK means “to come”). Don’t slow down too much. Get all the way through the thing to the end. It should be a few pages.
Then, when you’re done, go back and review it if you have time. If not, return to it in a day or two. Don’t abandon it, because it’s not done yet. You need to make sure it holds up, that this is actually what you want to say and where you want to take your readers—for now.
A good outline goes through a couple of drafts. For me and my latest project, I started with all the stuff I wanted to say, then found a structure—the basic ideas of the American Transcendentalists—to hang my argument on. That helped me figure out where I should put these stories and ideas and where I still had some reading to do.
These ideas, this outline, they all serve as prompts to get you writing. You find a good outline and commit to it, because it helps you not get too much into your head as you write. You open up your document, look at the outline, remembering what goes into this chapter, and start writing.
You don’t have to finish a whole chapter in one sitting. You probably won’t, depending on how long the chapters are, and how much time you have to write. Which is why I always try to leave the chapter a little undone, finishing a writing session before I complete a thought, knowing exactly what I want to come next.
This seems to fly in the face of the typical Annie Dillard wisdom you’ll see floating around on quote cards on the Internet—i.e., “spend it all”—but I don’t think it does. Dillard is saying, don’t hoard your ideas. Be generous. I agree. But you can be strategic with what you put on the page and what you hold back so that you know what comes next and can pick the project right up the next day.
Hemingway used to do this, intentionally ending a story somewhere in the middle where he knew exactly what was going to happen next. What the character would say. What turn in the plot was coming. Then he’d go fishing or hunting for the day. And while he was doing that, his subconscious would work out the rest of the story, running in the background of his mind so that when it was time to write again, he was ready.
It can be like that. Writing a book can feel like a love affair, something you have to steal away to, a secret you have that almost no one else knows about. You meet at odd hours of the day in strange places, but every time it feels like return. And over the course of many weeks and months, you create something together, you and this book and this silly table of contents you invented out of nothing. It all starts to compound into a real work that will, of course, be far from complete. But over time, with revision and intention and even more love, all these little visits you made will lead to something you can be proud of.
That’s outlining, in a nutshell. It’s not complicated, but it involves a certain amount of self-trust. Try not to doubt yourself, and realize the blueprint you make for yourself will, indeed, change. This is just meant to get you started. Everything else can be corrected along the way.
P.S. This is Part 2 of my series on the writing process. If you missed Part 1, go here. See the full summary of that series and how I’m documenting the journey of writing my sixth book. Later this week, I’ll share the current outline of my book, what I recently did on a weekend writing retreat, and why I’m already reworking some of the structure in real time. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!
How do you outline your own writing? What questions do you have about this process? Share in the comments below.
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