Wednesday, March 9, 2011

I hated outlining, love the outline

Last night I came home, sat down, and wrote.  I only had an hour and thought, I will probably only be able to write the first paragraph.  So I pulled out my outline, which took me the better part of six weeks to get through. 

In case you were wondering after yesterday's post: Closed the door, no cats, the keyboard worked, the computer worked, and everything went along just swimmingly.  I wrote for an hour.  I looked up and had finished just over 2,000 words.  In one hour.  For me that is fairly impressive.


Let me just say that I absolutely hated, HATED, doing the actual outline.  I outlined characters, families, stories that didn't actually fall into this particular story, the ebb and flow of this story, and multiple plot lines.  The outline itself is 25 pages.  It was tedious.  I almost stopped outlining a trillion times.  You see, I like to write.  I take that back, I like to tell stories.  Outlining is brutal and tedious to me.  Did I say I hate outlining?

But, it has won me over.  By having my outline, a blueprint, I was able to just focus on telling my story.  I didn't write until I hit a wall and follow that with staring at the computer for thirty minutes while I tried to figure out where I was going and how it would affect the rest of the story.  I just, wrote.  Usually I set aside two or three hours in order to get 1000 or 1500 words done.  I blew that total out of the water in just under an hour.  I have been trying to figure out ways to increase my productivity, to have more titles to my name etc.  By still setting aside two or three hours, I could reasonably be hitting the 3000-4000 word a night total.  You can sort of see where this is going.

And I owe it all to my outline.  And my Mac.  And the outline program "Writer's Dream Kit".  And locking my cats out of my office.

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