Writing: Outlining & Organization

This is my post for Day 7 of the Author Blog Challenge.



 

Describe your outline process for your book. What do you do to stay organized?


*huge pause while I laugh my rear end off*  Oh, wait! You're serious with this question? *sits and ponders how to answer*


My name and the word "organized" are pretty much opposites. In fact, if you look up "disorganized" in the dictionary, you will probably see my name.  The first time I even got close to finishing a novel I was writing was during NaNoWriMo in 2009. I started that novel with a firm idea of who and what and nothing more. Then I write all of it by the seat of my pants.

It's not the most effective method of writing a novel. That novel is still sitting at around 60,000 words with no ending in sight. Without an outline, it's easy to get stuck. This is a bit of a problem for me, because sometimes the way I start a novel is by sitting down to write with no idea what I am going to write until my hands start typing up a story.


I used to think an outline would be too restrictive. But I am now learning that an outline can be loose and flexible and still help me get to where I need to be with my writing - a finished novel.

An outline would probably also help with continuity issues. In that first novel, I had a character who was introduced as having gone a little bit crazy due to all of her years being treated as though she already was, but as the novel continued, I realized that I had normalized her too much; she didn't act the way that she had been described in the beginning. Notations made in an outline would have helped with that as I wrote the story so that I would not have needed to go back and change several scenes in the novel involving her.

My answer to the above question is that I am not organized and I do not have an outline process for my book, but I am working on it. (If anyone reading this has an outlining process that works particularly well for them, I would love to hear about it in the comments.)



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