Thursday, June 16, 2011

Don't touch that fire extinguisher

My hot streak has continued.Yesterday, I wrote another 1,955 words! This brings my running total above the 10,000-word mark by a healthy margin:
Things will probably slow down a little today, because I need to rework the next part of the outline. The way I've written the last couple of scenes dictates that the outline I have for the next two or three needs to be tweaked quite a bit. So I suppose that most of today's work time will be spent reshaping the next scene or two, with enough left over to write my minimum of 500 words. Unless my fire is still burning after all the outline work and I can zip through an extra 500 or so.

That's actually a real possibility, since I've reached the point where I'm actually "living" in this novel world of mine now. That's when my creativity hits overdrive and I just don't want to stop writing until it feels like the right time to quit. Although I love being inside the head of my protagonist so much, I never really feel like stopping. I just have to sometimes, to eat and sleep and stuff.

Anyway, I'm off to rework the outline. Wish me luck!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck! I'm in a similar position, as I've always written character-first (two novels) and am now writing a first draft using an outline. So far I've stayed true to that plan, and what's changed has been my character's reactions to what's happening to him. I'm excited to hear how your outline change works out. Have you mapped out each chapter? Mine is more a series of scenes and happenings, rather than specifics, so maybe that's why it hasn't changed (yet).

Leanne D. Baldwin said...

Hi, Laura! No, I haven't been working by chapters. I've just divided the outline into three big globs - Beginning, Middle, and End - and then sketched the bare bones of what I wanted to happen in each one.

Then I started drilling down into more and more details of what was to happen, with lots of detail in the Beginning section, less detail in the End section, and very little detail in the Middle. I figure the End needs to be fairly stable (to give myself a stationary target to aim at), and the Beginning needed to be really detailed because I'm writing that first, but the Middle will definitely depend on how the Beginning turns out.

That said, the small area of the outline I'm retooling today is the ending of the Beginning section.

So I've been thinking more in terms of scenes than chapters. I figured that I would go back afterward and, I hope, see places where the scenes naturally divide themselves into chapters.