Last week, I talked about creating your table of contents for your book, and I hinted that it was going to be a great tool for you when you actually come to write the book. So in today’s episode, I’ll show you what I mean by that, because today I’m focusing on what is known as the “fat outline”. 

A fat outline is really an extrapolation of your table of contents. Visualize, your table of contents for a moment, or actually look at it if you have already built it. You will probably have a list of maybe 10 lines, and that represents 10 chapters, one line for each. In fact, it’s just a title of a chapter. 

So what you’re going to do to create your fat outline is simply work through your table of contents chapter by chapter, making notes of what’s going to actually go into each chapter. 

So, take your table of content document and leave some space after the title of chapter one. Think about the title, think about the subject, and think about some of the things you’re going to put in chapter, and just jot them down as bullet points. 

Now, these are not going to appear in the book necessarily. They’re not going to appear in the final table of contents. This is just a tool for you, so it doesn’t matter whether they’re in order or whether the final titles, none of that matters. All this is doing is helping you to get a handle on what is going to go in the chapter. So start bulleting out the various points, the subjects that you’re going to cover within each chapter.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are writing a book about presentations, and one of the chapters in your book is going to be about creating visual aids. So what would you talk about with your visual aids? 

Now, I have written this, I’ve given presentations on this, so I know what I might include. I might have bullets for, “What mistakes people currently make with visual aids.” Under that, I might list things like too many words, too much information on a slide. What happens when there is too much information on a slide? What happens in the audience’s mind? What is the purpose of a visual aid? 

Notice, these are not in any order. I’m just putting them down as they’re popping into my mind. And that’s what I want you to do. So, I may have seven or eight bullet points on this. And some of them are really just reminders, maybe a couple of keywords that will remind me what I want you to see within the chapter. So even within one bullet point, I might put, “Best way to show statistics,” and then underneath that, I might put pie charts, bar charts, just as reminders to me that these are the things that constitute this chapter. So that’s an example of how you create your fat outline.

Once you’ve done with chapter one, then you go on and do the same thing for each chapter. 

Now, before you actually come to make use of your fat outline, go through it again, and this time, give some thought to the order of the information. Have you written it down here in the best order for the sake of the book and to make it easy to flow logically for your reader to read and understand it? And put it into the order that you think is going to be the most logical. 

This is your homework for this week, and this is actually a very big and important step in writing your book. So take some time. You don’t need to do it all at once. Do a chapter at once, but give it enough thought because remember, you have to fill out the information in these chapters so that they are good, meaty chapters for your reader to read and understand. 

Take your time, work through your table of contents, and create a fat outline for your book.