Since I’ll be spending so much of November working on my
NaNoWriMo project, I thought I’d show you a bit of my prewriting process. This is what I did during October. This post is about outlining.
I need to know my story before I can write it. I’ve tried writing without having an outline
and it turned into a jumbled mess that I still need to fix. Each story comes to me in varying degrees of
completeness. This story, I knew the
beginning, but I wasn’t sure about the ending.
I didn’t quite know where it would end.
To work it out, I use note cards.
Through experience, I learned to number them. It’s a basic idea of what happens when. I write one note card, then move to the next
one. If I’m stuck, I know I just have to
write the next one. This outline ended
up being almost 70 note cards long, which is quite a lot for me. Once I finish the skeletal structure of the
story, it’s time to add the meat – the muscle.
On the back of the note card, I add a few notes about that plot
point.
Then I take it all and type it up into an outline, with a
lot of spaces between each point. Once I
print it out, I add even more details below each plot point.
 |
| Putting more meat to the outline |
 |
| First draft outline |
In the end, I have a complete outline and a clear idea of
where I’m going. For this NaNoWriMo
novel, I created a 26 page outline, ready to guide me through the crazy month
of November. It’s my road map, keeping me
on track.
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