October 23, 2009
Outlining
I’ve decided that outlining my work might actually be a useful idea, especially since I’m working with a rather large chunk of words here. What I’m doing for my outlining is just writing down a list of main characters, throwing in a bit of description for them, and doing a point-by-point list of what happens to them. For example, for An Unaccustomed Wine, here’s a bit of the outline that I’ve got so far:
Max: Biochem/Physics double major. Ambitious and friendly.
Geoff: Art major. Standoffish, loner, no social skills. Gay.Max has no fine arts credit.
Max joins art class.
Max sucks at art.
Max asks Geoff for help.
Max learns Geoff is gay.
Max starts getting better grades in art.
Jeanine has existential crisis about her life.
I throw in about 35-40 points for each story (for a 50K story), so I get to write 1500-2000 words per entry, a couple extra points in case some of them run short (which some of them undoubtedly will). So far, I have An Unaccustomed Wine done, and I’ve got about half of my vampire ninja/werewolf pirate story (after finishing up the first 35, I realized that there was still plenty to tell, so I’m bumping the wordcount to ~75K-100K, or something like that). Hopefully, it’ll be easier and far less stressful with this outline, as basic as it is, than running free with little sense of direction. Something like this might even help edit the stories that I already have finished.
I’m still far behind on Gothic Trance, but I’m slowly getting there.
