Once your outline becomes large (50+ pages) you start thinking “where am I gonna put this quote for character x”, then you gotta search for the character, scroll around, etc. This starts taking up a lot of time. Doing outlines in Kabikaboo (free) totally solved this problem for me.

Glad to help.

Writing professors are a mixed bag. The ones who treat it like a craft, I like. The ones who treat it like an art, I don’t. I had both in college. One I loved, and he helped me hone my skills and get my first piece published at age 18. The other… well, I used for negative lessons only. As in, “Don’t do this, don’t do that.”

The funny part is, people assume that by outlining and doing prep work, you’ve somehow robbed the piece of its magic. Characters will still surprise you. Events will still change course. You control the story, but your subconscious mind will still have its say. But, once you’ve outlined, you’ve granted yourself greater freedom to improvise, not less. If you know your destination, or the landmarks along the way, you know how to course correct. Or, if you change those landmarks and destinations, you can see how the cascading effect changes the rest of the story because the outline already lays it all out for you.

– c.

I can’t work on the big ideas and the tactical issues at the same time. One distracts from the other. As you said in the previous post, writing is a craft. When I sit down to write, I need to focus on the words, not the plot or the character arcs. Those need to be straight in my head already.

In fact, I used to outline in a plain text file so that I wouldn’t even be distracted by formatting. (Now, I use Google Docs, which is pretty much the same thing.) I add bits of dialog and notes to the outline until it reaches a critical mass, then I write a few paragraphs and it all just grows together from there.

It’s good to know I’m not just a big science nerd who doesn’t get the artsy kids.

–Dan

See, good stuff. I like the idea of plotting out word count (or in the case of scripting, page count).

I might try that.

Also: sadly, the head is still filled with dead spiders and dry leaves. They’re just getting deader and drier, actually.

– c.

See, I’m a number’s oriented plotter. Characters spring fully formed from my brain, but on till I’ve taken them for a short story test run or otherwise exercised them, so trying to start with a character arch would murder me.

I don’t mind map well, because that’s just not limiting enough. For some reason, I need my creativity dragged into the basement and put in a ball vice until it yelps and does what I want.

So I start with the plot. I arc the plot first, often by word count. (Scary, I know.) “I want thirty chapters for this, at 100k, give or take, that’s going to take this many words a chapter, and then this many possible scenes per chapter at this many words peer scene.”

And then I break out the index cards, one for each scene and put down ANYTHING that sounds awesome. Anything that roughly fits in what I’m going to do with the story. Then I arrange them around in an order, get rid of cards that look like crap now, and fill in the blanks.

Bullet pointed outline follows, and a whiteboard story arch following a swiggly line of rising and falling action.

At this point, I’ve gotten an idea of the characters and point A, and start putting their own lines up to follow the story arc to see where they fit on it. By the time I’ve got those things going together on the whiteboard or in the Word outline or carved into my flesh, where ever the master outline is, I’ve already started writing early chapters or scenes to make sure I really mean it.

Everything is fluid, of course, and nothing looks like it does when I start by the time I’m done, so I guess it’s still a creative project even if it looks more like building furniture.

And now I’m rambling too. This is your fault. I’ve caught your idea diarrhea. I should write this out in a way that makes sense some time to compare and contrast on my own blog. Hmmm.

Evernote is great. I so far *generally* only use it to capture cool web pages for later — so often I come across something, and I think, “This could one day be a part of a great story,” and then I click away, away, away.

Now, Evernote lets me clip it. Which is nice.

– c.

First read on that comment: “A pubic service.”

…

Though, when I worked at the library (well, just before I got there), a flyer or webpage (not sure which) went out that had the term, “Pubic library.”

Good times, library. Good times.

– c.