Out of Line
This year, I planned to do something different from my last NaNoWriMo—and, in fact, different from any fiction writing I’ve ever really done before. I planned to outline my entire book before I started.
And I may yet—I have three days after all, until the big opening Write-In here at Casa Goddard (CAH-zah, because it’s Portuguese). But it will take some doing. So, naturally, here I am blogging about it instead of actually doing it.
In previous books, I’ve sketched out the general events I knew I wanted to happen, broken them up into rough chapters, and then started writing, updating and adding to those general events as I got closer to them. This worked fairly well for me, for about 2/3 of the book. At about that mark, I found that I had caught up with my planning, and was left with an empty space that encompassed about 25% of the book. It lasted until the climax, fow which I usually had a pretty clear plan. And I knew the things that had to have happened by then, but not exactly how they were going to play out.
To avoid that this time—and also to deal with the fact that I actually have a full time job this time around—I planned to try out this outlining thing. So far, I think I like it—or at least, my own strange version of it.
My outline has turned into a kind of free-writing exercise, ranging wildly from incredibly detailed, line-by-line conversations and events, to incredibly vague “then, such and such happens.” Occasionally, I’ll write actual dialogue that I want to use. There are no scene breaks, no chapter breaks, nothing but lines and lines of pencil-written chickenscratch. Occasionally, I’ll throw in some indentation, when I’m feeling particularly organized.
The original plan was to take that pile of chaos (it currently stands at 19 pages of a spiral-bound notebook) and turn it into a real, honest-to-goodness outline using Liquid Story Binder, which has a pretty handy outlining tool. That part, I’m a little more skeptical about being able to complete—but for the moment, I’m going to get back to my outline, and try to make it happen anyway.
Do I recommend this kind of outlining? I have no idea. Ask me again in 33 days.
