It’s one thing to have a general idea for a book. It’s totally another thing to start writing it and following the thought process. As mentioned in a previous blog that I tried doing the outline thing and found I wasn’t very successful.
I had outlined what I wanted each chapter to focus on, which characters would be involved. I was pretty impressed with myself- for about 15 minutes. I think I made it through a half of a chapter before I realized I’d already gone off the outline.
I scrapped that plan.
In this book, I’m freestyling again. I have actually no idea where the characters are going, what they’re going to say, do, think etc. In idea will pop into my brain and I start typing it out, deleting multiple times, finding the flow and then run with it.
However, without the overall plan, I wonder if I’m doing myself a disservice. For example, I mentioned in one of the puzzle blogs about a new character knocking on the door (literally- he’s knocking on a door). That’s all well and good, I like Tobias, but now I have a whole new facet to this book and the storyline. It’s not going to bring me off topic, but I have an entirely new avenue to explore.
I’m not writing War and Peace. I can’t have this novel be 200k words. Ask Jay, I have a tendency to get verbose. My word count is hovering at 48k and my characters haven’t even experienced a full twenty-four hours.
I envision a little less cornstarch to thicken my plot.
Have any of you combatted this issue? What’s your preferred writing method. I think narrowing it to fiction would help. I believe outlines for non-fiction might be a little bit easier to adhere to.
Cheers!
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Marina Skynnar- Author 