What's Up Wednesday? Not Much

Well I'm late, but that's okay. I honestly don't have much to say. I've been very productive this week, but I'm still working with the note cards. I'm almost done outlining the 70,000+ words I have so far and I've come up with 12 new scenes to be inserted into those 70K words. I'm rough guesstimating (that's an actual word?) that those 12 scenes will get me about 16,000 more words. This story is definitely going to be 90K, if not 100K, words long. *passes out* That's a lot of words.

So, yeah, I'm still plugging away. I'd really like to have this whole story plotted out and begin working on the real first draft by the end of July. It would be kind of nice to have the first draft finished and resting by November so that I can do NaNoWriMo this year. But we'll see. My writing plans and deadlines almost never work out. :)

And of course, before I go, I'll share some more Chuck Wendig gold. If you're not following his blog already then you need to fix that. 50 RANTYPANTS SNIDBITS OF RANDOM WRITING & STORYTELLING ADVICE  My favorites are #1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 34, 45, 49 & 50. So, like, all of them. :D

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. :)

• Chuck Wendig is kind of a genius and always has awesome writing advice. So here's Ten Stupid Writer Tricks (That Might Actually Work) 
• This one is for my fellow writing moms. How Do You Find Time To Write? 6 Tips for Moms (And Everyone Else, Too)
• And even though I talked a lot about outlining today, I know there's a lot of people who just can't do it. So this one is for you, On Writing Despair (Juicebox Mix)

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.

Been Kind Of Dry Here

I have not actually written in over 22 days. I’m not saying that is an accomplishment, I’m just stating it as fact. But that does not mean that I haven’t been actively working on my story. I stopped writing 22 days ago because I got to the point where I had stopped outlining a while ago. You see, I’ve had a pattern with this story, when I first came up with the idea I pounded out a disgraceful prologue and a couple chapters and then I stopped. I had no idea where I wanted to go. So then I sat down an outlined chapters 4-12. When I finished outlining chapter 12 I was stuck again, I didn’t know what direction I wanted to take. So I figured that I’d just start writing and see where the flow of the story took me when I got to chapter 12. And thus, 22 days ago I finished writing chapter 12 and only had vague ideas of what would happen next. So I fell back to outlining.

Thus far, I have outlined chapters 13-18 and am working on 19. I used to hate outlining. Back in the days when I had to outline research papers, I thought it was such a waste of time. And I hated it when an outline was part of your final score. But with this project I have found that outlining is good. It gives me time to think and brain storm. And even though I didn’t do all the outlining at once I think it’s been helpful to do a little of each off and on. It’s a good balance of freedom and structure.

And normally, outlining wouldn’t take me this long, but life has been crazy. What with work, home duties and starting a new business, I’m surprised I write at all some days. And admittedly, I do 90% of my writing at work (as I’m doing right now ;)). The benefits of working at a super slow branch. I even managed to write 3837 words one day. How awesome is that?