Wednesday, June 19, 2013

WUW: Organic Outlining

Outlining my story onto note cards is going really well. I'm coming up with new scenes, filling in plot holes, finding and fixing little inconsistencies, and diving deeper into my characters. I'm anxious to get back to actual writing and have a complete first draft.

While doing all of this I think I've come up with a term for my writing process. I'm an Organic Outliner. I come up with a story idea and then I'll start writing it. That goes for a while until I realize how shallow and weak the story is. Then I'll stop and do some world building and outlining until I'm ready to go back to writing. This spurt of writing goes longer, but it too will eventually grind to a halt and that's when I get out the note cards and break the story down scene by scene. Once I have all the scenes plotted out, I rearrange them and modify them and make sure everything flows well. Then I can get down to actually writing a first draft.

So, see, there's a lot of outlining and planning involved, but I can't really get to know my story, it's characters and the world until I'm writing it. So many awesome things have come up while writing that I could have never thought of while outlining. Most of it is character stuff. I don't get to know them until I have to write as them.

And once that first draft is complete, with Once Upon A Time..... Awesomely Cool Stuff Happens... The End, then I can start the editing process. But we'll save that for another post, *coughbecauseI'mnotreallysurehowthatworksyetcough*.

In the mean time, I have some stuff to share. :)

People like using parentheses in their titles don't they?

Anyway, where do you fall in the outlining vs. pantsing debate? Leave a comment down below and let's have a conversation!

Happy Wednesday!

Snoopy is wise, listen to him.

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