Re: Outline > approx. word count?


"Van Swaney" <holonomix@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1151968247.289096.35770@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Darkhawk H. Nicoll wrote:
Van Swaney <holonomix@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Do you:
[much snipped]

I don't outline, so most of your "follow the outline (of course)" and
similar comments don't really apply to my process.

Wow...working without a net! There's no way I could trust myself
enough to do that.

It's not necessarily a matter of trust. At least one of the people I know
who works without outlines does so because she gets *bored* if she knows
what happens next. Another does so because if she writes down even a
*summary* of the story, her backbrain thinks she's told the story and she's
done, and she *can't* write the novel. Another just doesn't want to waste
time writing anything but "pay copy." Another doesn't *need* an outline
because she does that part in her head. Etc.

I have outlines, but I don't follow them. It's worked fine for me for 25
years, except for the two books that didn't have any outlines at all, the
one because it just didn't and the other because it was a collaborative game
and not a book, right up until we got to the end of it.

Granted, I carry a lot of it in my head...at least
at first...but then it gets to the point where I'm conceptualizing
enough so fast, the Muse non-linearly tele-beaming stuffums pell-mell
into my headspace such that I feel I have to write things down (i.e.
plot way points, snippets of convo, crucial character development
thingies) for no other reason that I'll bloody well *forget* them
otherwise.

Which might be a good reason *not* to write them down, if the end result is
that your stuff is getting too crowded with all these *ideas*. Again, yet
another writer I know seldom writes down any of the sort of preliminary bits
and pieces you describe, because he feels that if it's not memorable enough
for *him* to remember, it's not going to be memorable to the *reader*...and
having the ideas and then letting them knock around inside his head until
the non-memorable ones fall out and disappear is a really good way to make
sure that what eventually gets down on the page *is* memorable.

And a written outline births itself into being by its own
due process. And there are other times when I just won't feel
comfortable enough continuing work on chapter two (during actual
writing-out prose phase) if I feel that the situation set-up and
overall basis coming about in chapter seventeen isn't established
clearly enough. I guess that's just how I work. I just had an example
of this kind of situation very recently, actually, with my WIP.

Um, just how detailed an outline do you usually *do*, anyway? And how
closely do you end up following it?

Patricia C. Wrede


.

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