Hello everyone!
Outlining went very well this week. I wrote detailed outlines through part four of Maws and Claws and have started work on the final section of the manuscript. Although I knew that part four was going to consist of quick chapters before a major event to cap off this act, I feel like you’d never know it by looking at the outline. Even though I’ve been brainstorming ideas for three months now, I’m still surprised by how much is going to be contained in each chapter. Sometimes I’m still jotting notes in the margins because new things are still coming to me that I want to include when I write the first draft.
Although we’re coming to the end of outlining, there’s still a lot to do. One thing I noticed is that I’m sometimes just including mention of a subplot in the chapters, and not actually expanding on how this subplot will be progressing through the story. Including it in the notes is merely a placeholder, a reminder that I still need to flesh this out. My work is still cut out for me, and this subplot (and any others I might find when reviewing the detailed outline) is going to be my focus for the coming week.
We’re also arriving at the first deadline of the script: wrapping up outlining.
What’s bringing on this deadline? When I looked at the calendar this week, I saw that we’re only weeks away from November. For those that don’t know, November is the month of NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. It is a writing competition against procrastination to write either an entire book or 50,000 words in a single month.
I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo the last two years, and was planning on writing the first draft of In the Maws and Claws during the month. This means that next week’s blog will be the last on outlining, and the focus will then shift to actually writing the story.
A nervous excitement is growing. I’ve wanted to get through the outlining process so that I could move on to the next step of actually writing the manuscript, but needed the extensive outlining to feel comfortable to actually sit down and begin. Now that I’m coming up to the doorstep of NaNoWriMo, all the things that are still lacking are jumping out at me, demanding I address them before I can start the first draft.
While this is a little daunting, I know that I’ll only be starting work on the first draft, one of many. So while I’ll still want to address these issues as soon as possible, I’m confident each draft will polish the rough edges more and more until these issues are fixed and the manuscript gets to the place it needs to be.
Until next time.