WIP CHALLENGE CHECK IN - DAY 3

[peachpai]

Happy Sunday! How's writing?

-Wrote something, woo!
-Planning, outlining, note taking, research, etc.
-Editing
-Sent something to my beta
-It's done! I posted!
-Thought about writing
-Taking a day off
-Something else (discuss in comments)


Sunday Discussion: Do you make outlines for stories? If so, what is your outline process? Is it a mess of words? Is it neat and details? Is it a few paragraphs summarizing what you want to do?

Comments

[enemytosleep]

I haven't written yet today because of work, but I hope to get some more D&D notes typed up tonight.

I am a big fan of outlines. They often include snippets of dialogue, partial scenes, research notes, and summary descriptions of what I plan to happen.

[enemytosleep]

I'm half-way through typing up my notes, so I'll try and plug away at them this week as I have time and should be able to finish what's left next weekend.

[linaewen]

I did some editing today, but that's about it.

I spend a lot of time making outlines. They aren't necessarily in proper outline form, usually consisting of bullet points under each main point I want to cover in a chapter. The main points are in chronological order, and the subpoints include research, possible conversations, plot questions that need to be answered when I get to the actual writing of it that part, stuff like that.

[frogfarm]

After a long and satisfying day of other-stuffing, I've just finished dinner and am settling down to see which WIP strikes my fancy.

Pretty much what others have said previously -- I don't use a formal outline unless it's a longer story. Anything under 10k words usually suffices with a skeleton version of the story itself, ranging from actual dialogue and plot points to "this needs to happen here". At some point I have enough skeleton to start hanging flesh on, and that's when I start trying to actually write the opening scene.

[frogfarm]

Though the longer a story is, the more crazy I get with my "outlines". My first published fic (more or less) was a bloated epic of 17 chapters and 150k+ words, and I ended up with a mountain of scribbled notes on actual paper, including a rough map of the area. Most importantly, I made a chart that it's been so long I can't even remember how it was laid out, but it laid out a grid chapter by chapter, along with each scene, and noted which characters appeared in each scene. With a large cast, something like that made it a lot easier to keep track of all the people and events taking place.

[doranwen]

Writing is… not happening right now because I just got enough energy back from having the flu that I need to get to all the things I was *going* to do this past week and didn't because I was lying on the couch wiped out.


As for outlines…

The few times I end up starting fics long enough to *need* an outline, I write lists of scene summaries - one-liners, each.

"so-and-so do this, and this happens"
"char A goes here, char B asks them why X"

Whether I end up actually following the outlines or not varies widely.

[lady_katana4544]

Did a bit of writing, but was mostly other stuffing today with job hunting things. Might take a day off from writing tomorrow,, unsure so we'll see how things go tomorrow.

[samuraiter]

I posted two stories today (i.e. yesterday) for a total of about 1,300 words. *nods* Good progress, if you ask me.

I like to outline, but I try to be relatively abstract about it because the more specific I get, the more likely the story will deviate from the outline. :-P