Abbott on Tinderbox

Jeff Abbott, author of Panic and Fear, has just finished a book tour for Collision and is writing about questions he was asked. Today, he talks about Tinderbox and how he uses it to outline his best-selling tales.

You can attach detailed notes to your outline entries. You can put related groups of entries into visual boxes called containers. I create containers for backstory, Act One, Act Two, and so on, which is an incredibly powerful and flexible way to organize my notes and structure my story. I can also have notes appear in one than more place: so I can have a note about the scene where the hero meets his true love in the main book outline, and then make that same note reappear in a subplot outline called "love affair".