The Vale Voice - Outline (Patreon)

Before we fully move on from this story, I wanted to share a couple pictures of the outlines I used.  (Please excuse my horrible handwriting and poor picture-taking ability.)

As a brief recap of my writing process leading up to an outline:

1. Come up with a new idea
2. Write out as many scenes/plot points/interesting interactions that I can think of
3. Start grouping events into chapters
4. Create initial outline based on those chapters

For The Vale Voice, the initial outline looked like this:

You might notice that:

- I didn't write with other people's eyeballs in mind
- Chapter 3 could have been the curious adventure of a nondescript squiggle
- I thought I could finish the story in only 14 chapters (ha...)

Typically, I'll work on the same sheet of paper as the story grows.  In this case, however, my initial outline was so far off that I decided to re-write and start fresh.  This way my second outline would be cleaner and well-organized.

Outline #2:

Better.  Much better.

I worked off of this outline all the way through the story, and you'll probably notice a few more interesting things.  Such as:

- I went from 14 to 18 chapters before finally finishing with 21
- A couple of early chapters got split because there were too many events in them and they got too long
- Chapter 14 got squeezed in to add more Blake/Yang interactions and make their relationship even cuter
- I wrote down the number of days Yang had been at The Voice as well as what day of the week the chapter landed on.  (Keeping track of the day of the week is important when things like "weekends" or "Mondays" are significant to the characters and their routines.)
- I used checkmarks to denote when I finished a chapter but apparently abandoned that midway through
- My V's sometimes look like checkmarks

And that's basically it - from outline to working outline to completed story.  (There might be a few more steps in there...but we'll save those for later.)

I hope you enjoyed this quick look into my process! 

Until next time, 

Miko