Working Annotated Table of Contents

a scaffold to hold up — and help you to keep tabs on — your work-in-progress

Along the way to finishing a project of substantial scale, say a memoir or a novel, a writer can sometimes grow overwhelmed by the volume of their own material. The shape of the narrative may become vague. What parts of the story have I already written down, and where the heck are they? Was that character or place description actually executed or was it just an idea, a revision I intended but never carried out? Am I repeating myself? How does the timeline unfold, and when exactly should certain key flashbacks occur — those ones that reveal so much that’s crucial to the reader’s understanding of the front story?

In the style of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling or W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, I propose the creation of an annotated table of contents for writers who find themselves in such a situation, whether their projects are fiction or non. Regardless of whether you will chose to leave this meta-document in your final text, it’s a great way to get a slightly more detailed handle on a manuscript.

from The History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding

You might start with a short summary of the overall action, but it could be even more useful to go into slightly greater detail by enumerating individual scenes with a brief reference, or by mentioning the central character or characters, themes, settings or other elements that strike you as most important.

from The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

As you create this document, use it as a diagnostic tool. It can help you track the frequency and length of POV sections, settings, or action scenes, your use of imagery, the presence of secondary and tertiary characters, or other narrative elements that you want to keep control of. I like to use colored highlighting to track elements that repeat and recur so I can detect the patterns I’ve created, which often gives rise to some rearrangement as I try to make sure these patterns are regular — but not too regular. You may even discover the presence of certain themes you’d hardly noticed you were exploring, as you do this work, creating space for their perpetuation and development.

If you’re what’s called a pantser, you may resist this kind of charting, but you could benefit from creating a TOC for just the work you’ve already drafted; it may guide you toward what needs to come next. If you’re a plotter, you may already have a clear outline of your plot, but you could use an annotated TOC to step away from plot and action and focus such elements as your themes, motifs, settings, flashbacks or secondary characters. Regardless, it’s a tool that can help ensure the shape you’ve built — or are building — for your story is coherent.