McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc Part II.
Ren:
Ah good, I'm not alone then...8)
The Deposed King:
Yeah my experience is that you can start out with a concept, a few general ideas on where you're going with the story and a couple key characters in your head and run with it. As you write more books and in the same series, you'll find yourself both needing and producing a more defined outline either mental or physical of what's going to happen next.
But nothing I've done would warrant a 5-10k outline prior to actually starting the book. Not to say such outlines don't work for many people, David Drake for one.
The Deposed King
Ren:
Rofl after adjusting my Master Doc to double-spaced...ballooned to 349 pages...so way over my goal for what I wanted to achieve by my birthday...8)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Wordmaker on May 07, 2013, 02:00:59 PM ---Don't sweat if you don't have an outline written. Most of my writing, especially when I'm just starting a book or series, is all done on the fly.
--- End quote ---
*nod* Outlines are tools for keeping everything in one place and roughly connected, to my mind, not only do they not have to bear much resemblance to the finished product, but for me if they do, it means the book's not got enough life to be surprising me and that's generally a very bad sign.
I'll note, which I haven't for a while, two writers with successful careers of a few decades in genre who occupy extreme positions on outlining which they have talked about in public; Tim Powers outlines his every book down to what happens in each conversation before writing it; Steve Brust makes it up entirely as he goes along, and when he gets stuck, will write about the characters having meals and bitching about being stuck and so on until he gets to the next bit of plot and then cut as apt. He appears to be as in the dark and as fascinated by how his creative process works as any of his readers; if you've read Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill, the bit with the goat was something he deliberately included as a throwaway early on specifically to see how his subconscious would make it important later in the book..
Ren:
Yeah every Author I've ever talked to has their own process. And I would want to get more of a general skeleton/framework of an Outline so I know generally where the story is going...so I can then work on getting there...8)
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