Outlining is the first step to writing an adult visual novel, but is it necessary? Some people would say no, others swear by it. Personally, I believe outlining is one of the most important things you can do, especially if your AVN has branching paths and multiple endings. You’re far more likely to get confused, lost, create plot holes, and disappoint players if you don’t at least have a loose plan in place.
Visual novels are long form fiction and can be incredibly complex in their approach to story telling. While many novelists like Stephen King don’t outline their books, AVNs require a little more planning. Kinetic novels being the exception as they are linear stories so can be treated the same way as a novel (i.e. outlining can be argued as a preference). But if you’re serious about writing a visual novel with branching paths, outlining is vital. All game studios in other genres outline their stories, so games in the adult genre should too. Baulder’s Gate 3 wasn’t made up as they wrote it. Larian’s writers had an outline, an end goal, and plot points to hit. Your AVN should too.
So the question is, how do you outline an adult visual novel?
Styles of Outlining
There are numerous approaches, so what works best for me likely won’t work best for you (my outlining system is rather chaotic). But the important thing to remember is that an outline doesn’t have to be written in stone, it can simply be a loose guide that you follow. But the more complex your AVN is, the more in-depth your outline should be. You can also combine any of these methods to create your own system that works best for you.
I’m going to list several different outlining methods and if any catch your attention, give them a try. I’ll list them from the heavier, more meticulous methods, to the lighter free-form methods.
The Encyclopedia
This method doesn’t focus on the plot. Instead, it’s a worldbuilding extravaganza that allows you to understand your world and everything in it before you even think about writing the story. You’re essentially creating an encyclopedia of the world, much like Tolkien did for Lord of the Rings. This outlining method can take a lot longer than others, depending on how much detail you give in your descriptions and the research you do. But it means the more you build your world, the more ideas you’ll have for your actual story. The encyclopedia is most commonly used by fantasy and science fiction writers because they need to create believable worlds, but it can work for any genre.
With this method, your story will naturally reveal itself throughout the worldbuilding process, but it can also be combined with one of the other methods below to narrow down the plot once you’ve created the world.
The Script
If you were writing a novel, this method would tell you to write nothing but the dialogue and action. However, that’s essentially all there is to an AVN (we use images instead of long descriptions). So in our genre of storytelling, this method essentially means writing the entire story before you even touch the artwork. You’ll no doubt edit things later and fill in some gaps you might have, but the vast majority of the story will be written before you even consider doing anything else.
The Snowflake Method
The Snowflake method is simple enough but it can be rather intensive. The basic principle behind it is to take a single idea and expand on it. That’ll give you several more ideas so you expand on each of them, and you repeat this process until you’ve fleshed out your entire novel.
The Skeletal Outline
One of the best things you can do when outlining an adult visual novel is to ensure that your story has a solid plot. You don’t want to write the whole thing and then realise the story is just one long ramble with no obvious point. That’s why following plot guides and ensuring your story fits inside them is a solid approach to take. This method ensures your AVN has a definitive beginning, middle, and end right from the start. I’ve already written a brief guide to plotting your story if you want to learn more about this method.
Chapter by Chapter
This method is exactly how you imagine. You work through your story, giving a brief outline of every chapter and its key points until you have a completed story line from start to finish. This method is very useful for AVNs as they’re often released in chapters/episodes so it helps you break down the development cycle into smaller manageable chunks that then become your releases.
Mindmapping
Think spider diagram but more useful. Everybody that uses this method has their own approach but the thought process behind it is simple. Start with your main idea and work outwards from there, adding as much detail as you feel is necessary. The trick with mindmapping is to get as many ideas down as possible to give you more of an insight when you start writing. This can be used as a pre-outline or as the outline itself if you want more freedom to discover the story as you write.
The Synopsis
This is essentially a summary of your story. This can be as long or short as you need it to be. The idea behind the synopsis is to write the story and all of its major plot points as briefly as possible. This method is ideal for those that don’t need to iron out every detail before they start writing. It covers the main plot points but leaves room for your imagination to take you off on a tangent as you write.
Outline While You Write
This method is great for those who aren’t really sure where their story is going but want to start writing straight away. All you have to do for this outlining process is begin writing your story. When you end the chapter or scene, briefly flesh out the next couple in an overview, and then write them fully before repeating the process. This keeps the story flexible but you run the risk of going down a route that doesn’t work due to the lack of planning, so be careful.
Free Write
Just write anything and everything. Plenty of AVN developers do this, some more successfully than others. You don’t have to follow any structure, you just write whatever feels right at the time and go into as much detail as you think is necessary. It’s a viable method that many novelists use, but if you want to create a complex branching story where the player’s choices matter, you need to create an actual outline. Free writing also relies on an innate storytelling ability so it can be incredibly difficult to create a compelling story without any planning.
Ways to Outline a Visual Novel
Once you’ve decided how you’re going to outline your AVN, you need to decide the best approach to take. How you do this will largely depend on what method you’ve chosen and your personal preferences. Like with most writing advice, there are multiple ways to do this so I can’t tell you exactly how you should write your outline. But I can talk about some of the different options available to you.
So for example, if you want to create an encyclopaedia for your sci-fi world, you could use a site like World Anvil to create a library of information. Or you could write the entire script in a word document. You could even write the main story beats on post it notes and stick them on the wall above your desk. Or you could use software like Twine to write your outline as it’s designed to create and track branching narratives (and it’s free).
The first question you need to ask yourself is, how complex will my visual novel be? If it’s highly complex with branching storylines and multiple endings, you’ll need to find a way track every path. That’s where software like Twine comes in handy, but this can just as easily be done with a pen and paper so you really have to find what method feels the most natural to you.
Your outline should also be easy to follow. If you’re searching through five different notebooks for a particular scene that you know you’ve written but can’t find, that’s no good. It’s important to make sure your outline is accessible and understandable. You’ll also need to make backups of your outline if it’s stored digitally. The last thing you want is to lose all of your work to a dying SSD card.
How I Outlined My Adult Visual Novel
I figured it might help to explain how I outline The Home of Pleasure so that you have an idea of how some of these methods work in reality. But I should preface this by saying that my method is a bit of a mix of the above and not always the easiest to manage, so if you’re averse to slightly chaotic styles of work, this approach likely won’t work for you.
From my understanding of the little snippets that Dr Pinkcake (the developer of Being a DIK) has said about his process, my outline functions similarly to his. However, the finer details will no doubt vary drastically. What I mean by this is that we both keep our outlines in a single word document and delete each part of the outline once it’s been added to the game. Past that information, I have no idea what approach Dr Pinkcake took when writing his outline.
Stylistically, I use a combination of the skeletal outline and the chapter by chapter method. So I took a plot guide (Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Beat Sheet) and created a rough story outline. Then I broke that down into chapters before breaking it down further into days. Each day is then divided into scenes. Some scenes are almost fully written, others are simply vague ideas that I expand upon when I write.
At my old job, I spent a lot of time sat in the passenger seat of a van with hours to kill and many nights in hotel rooms with nothing to do, so I had the time to be thorough. And because I needed to be able to write on my phone, my entire outline is written in a single word document, divided into chapters, days, and scenes in a never ending list of bullet points. This makes tracking branching paths difficult and one of the reasons I consider this method to be somewhat chaotic.
My list of bullet points is comprised of ‘if this path: this scene’ and ‘if that path: that scene’, intermixed with scenes every player sees. This makes it difficult to visualize the different paths and requires paying close attention to them so that I don’t accidentally create plot holes. The other problem with this is that because The Home of Pleasure has so many options, it needs countless alternative scenes to ensure every path, no matter what is chosen, still makes narrative sense. The vast majority of these little alt scenes aren’t included in my outline, so I have to keep a track of it all in my head and write them as and when they’re needed. I’ll be honest, it’s quite difficult sometimes.
The other reason I consider my outlining process to be chaotic is because I don’t treat my outline like a religious text that can’t be altered. If I have a better idea, I write that instead. Or if I think pulling something from further down the line would work better in this particular place, I’ll do it. I see my outline as a rough guide. As I get to know the characters better and their stories develop, I let them naturally go wherever they need to as long as it fits within the overarching plot. But this also means that by the time I’ve finished working on an update, my outline often needs rewriting to make sure I cover the changes I’ve made to the story.
THoP’s outline is constantly evolving because I change it as I write. And if you were to read it, the further in you get, the more vague it becomes. That’s because there’s no point writing out all seven planned chapters in full when I know I’m going to be changing things as I work. I try to have the chapter I’m working on, and the following one, mostly complete. Everything past that is viewed as an idea that will likely change by the time I get there.
Find What Works For You
As you can probably tell, my outlining process is quite chaotic. But it needs to be so that I have space to create the little variations that occur due to all of the choices I’ve given the player. My method also requires maintenance due to not strictly following my outline, but this method works for me.
Only you will know what works best for you. But if you’re stuck and have no idea where to start, the easiest thing to do is to pick one of the methods listed above, try it, tweak it to fit your needs, and let it naturally develop into an outlining process that works for you.