How To Write Your Outline

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Outline guidelines:

As you might already know, the series Transforming Your Life is all about exploring the transformative moments our authors have had in their lives, and how it changed their lives. As you outline, you need to tell us the basic theme of your chapter, and the moment of transformation that you’ll be building your chapter around. 

So here are the things we look for while approving an outline:

  1. Does it fit into the spirit of the book?
  2. Does it have a transformative moment/period/state of mind at the heart of it?
  3. Does it have something our readers can learn from?
  4. Is it unique enough?
  5. Is it personal enough? (Remember: you have to be honest and vulnerable here)
  6. Does the author have enough to say with the outline?
  7. How does the moment of transformation lead to what they do now?

Chapter approval guidelines:

We will be reviewing your outline before you can start writing your chapter. Make sure your outline gets approved before you start writing your chapter to save yourself and us a lot of time and back and forth. Once your outline is approved, you can start writing your chapter.

We recommend that your chapter be in a format that clearly has your moment of transformation at the heart of it. The first section may be able to explore your life pre-transformation, and the middle section can be all about the events that triggered the transformation.

The third section should be about your life post-transformation, and how it has affected you. 

We then need to address how the reader can achieve transformation in their own life. You can create a list of tasks for them to follow, general advice, or a well-thought-out plan to get them there.  

Here are a few things that may result in your chapter/ parts of your chapter being rejected:

 

  1. Non-themed sections: If you have tangents in your story that cannot connect back to the main heart of your chapter, we might ask you to remove them.

     

  2. Facts not backed by sources: If you are citing anything as fact without an appropriate source, we might ask you to remove it.

     

  3. Offensive material: If your chapter has parts that might be considered offensive by a marginalized group, that goes against the spirit of the series, and so we may ask you to remove it.