Hello everyone.
First, I’m thrilled to have once again gotten back into the routine of outlining daily. I always love to write, and that includes the entire process, beginning with brainstorming and outlining, but I do need to treat this like a job. As such, I never want to get lax with it and start taking “days off” because then I feel like it’s hard to get back into the swing of things. Taking two consecutive days off last week, while I got right back into it again, still gave me some concern, and I’m happy to see there was no lingering effects.
This week, I began making detailed outlines of the chapters for In the Maws and Claws. After two months of outlining, I found that I had been coming up with so many ideas for character backstories, as well as just interesting details to sprinkle throughout the book for a little flare, that I was having a hard time keeping track of where it would all be going.
It was an odd sort of feeling for me when I started doing this. This is something I always do for any book that I write, and yet even though I’ve been working on this idea for a while, not just outlining it, it still feels new and like I’m at the start of the process (which if I’m honest, I am, you’ll see for yourself). Simultaneously, at the time this is posted to my blog, it’ll be within one month of the start of NaNoWriMo.
This was the natural next step to take in the outlining process. As I mentioned, this is now when I’m gathering together all the details and perspectives I’d given to the different characters in their own individual run throughs of the plot, and are compiling them together to make sure I know what each character is going through at each phase of the story. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve noticed little details that I’d jotted down, sometimes months ago, that I’d completely forgotten about until this step. This is why it pays to write good ideas down, so they’re not forgotten through time.
Doing this has also allowed me to bring into focus aspects of the manuscript that still need to be figured out. In some of the run throughs, I’d scribbled down a general sense of new information that should be doled out to the reader for some chapters, but haven’t gotten into specifics. This mostly has to do with the backstories of the main characters, and hinting at them through dialogue and inner thoughts in these scenes.
But all I had for notes to this point is ‘backstory’ or ‘more backstory detail.’ While I’d already plotted out the whole backstories for them earlier in my notes, merely writing that I should reveal some of it here isn’t going to help me when I sit down to write (again, in less than a month!). So this step is unbelievably helpful in that it’s forcing me to think now what specifically about their backstory is going to be brought up first, what details am I’m going to turn to next to build on what I’d already hinted at, until I’ve guided the reader through everything they’ll need to know.
It’ll probably cause me to come back and make revisions to these earlier chapters, but at least then, I’ll have this detailed outline to refer to to easily find the changes I want to make.
Until next week.