Whew! So far, I’m hitting all my goals, but only just.
Last night, I managed to scrape together outlines of my last few scenes. They aren’t great, but I’m expecting that, as I write, they will coalesce by the time I finish. Besides, I expect that by the time I get there, I’ll be well past 50K, and thus out from under the gun of November, so that I’ll be able to take my time.
However, I could not take my time today. I had set the goal for myself of hitting 7,500 words, without realizing how scanty the outlines for my first few scenes really were. My next few scenes are actually outlined fairly thoroughly, so it will be less work to put them together. Today, though, I took 17 handwritten lines of notes and turned them into 7,519 words. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.
I also had to name some characters, which I put more effort into this time around than I have in the past. I’ll introduce those names in a later post. For the moment, I’ll leave you with the Lines Of The Day. I may not do this every day, but whenever I write something that strikes me as moderately worthwhile I’ll share it with you.
“Mr. Kelter, I realize this may be an unusual request, but hear me out. When Jenny first decided to come out here to visit Seattle Pacific, I did some research on the school. Part of that research was reading several editions of the Falcon, where I read some of articles about the unfortunate events of this past January—and your part in them. And I also read the article you wrote in regards to your investigation of the death that occurred in your church. If you don’t mind my saying so, those were both rather impressive accomplishments.”
David, as it happened, didn’t mind.
And with that, I’m going to bed. Tommorow, I’ll write something more sensible, like 1,667 words. Or so.
Filed under: General Writing | NaNoWriMo, outlining, The Murder School|No Comments
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.
Filed under: Prewriting | NaNoWriMo, outlining|No Comments
