In this paper, we propose an optimal control technique for a class of continuous-time nonlinear systems. The key idea of the proposed approach is to parametrize continuous state trajectories by sequences of a finite number of intermediate target states; namely, waypoint sequences. It is shown that the optimal control problem for transferring the state from one waypoint to the next is given an explicit-form suboptimal solution, by means of linear approximation. Thus the original continuous-time nonlinear control problem reduces to a finite-dimensional optimization problem of waypoint sequences. Any efficient numerical optimization method, such as the interior-reflection Newton method, can be applied to solve this optimization problem. Finally, we solve the optimal control problem for a simple nonlinear system example to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.