Tuesday 14 July 2009

Are you bored of me talking about my outline yet?

I have a headache, so this will be a short post where I ramble on about the Snowflake Method some more.

Step Six's four page outline has grown into a six page outline - however I think this is mostly because it's supposed to be four typed pages, and I'm writing longhand. It's almost done now - just the black moment and resolution to detail. Several more steps to go, and this is already the most detailed outline I've ever written.

The next step after that is even more detailed character work, and then what basically amounts to notecarding - a list of one sentance descriptions of scenes. I hope to cover both of those in the next few days.

Then comes step nine - which amounts to telling the story, because what you do is summarise each scene instead of writing it as a scene. That means there will probably be a couple of pages of outline per chapter. It's basically a draft 0.5 of the novel. Goodness knows how long that will take, but I hope to be done with it by the end of July. Mainly because I want to outline another idea in August. I suppose nothing is stopping me from co-outlining two projects at once, but it might confuse me - I confuse easily.

The final step is step 10 - write your novel. I'm currently thinking of trying to write this one in September as a dry run for NaNoWriMo to check I can actually write a novel from an outline like this. If I do I'll keep you informed here.

2 comments:

Natalie Hatch said...

Becky, have you gone to Lynn Veihl's 'Paperback Writer' blog? She has a free download called 'The Novel Notebook' which is absolutely fantastic when you're plotting out your story. I wrote a whole novel in 9 days using it. At the moment she's doing a series of free writing workshops. http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/

Becka said...

Hi Natalie,

Not yet. I'll have to have a look at that one. I'm always interested in how other people write.

Thanks,
Becky