Learning to Outline (Patreon)

One of my challenges as a writer is learning to outline my work. I've often liked to just run things by the seat of my pants, and when I come to roadblocks and decisions, I will sit back and think what to do. The serial, "Every Day is Monday" is a perfect example of this technique, but I also wanted to run that as a loosely flowing story and see where it goes. This works fine for me for short stories, but it's has some shortcomings that are forcing me to change my techniques.

The first I find is many of my older works have a seam where there's a point where I started with a concept and ran it until I realized where I was going wasn't quite where I wanted to go and I changed course. While I would try and even that out in the editing process, I've written a number of things that either start to slow or take a hook that I never smoothed out. I've increasingly wanted to know what I'm aiming for before I do short stories like this, and there are projects I haven't started until I've had a solid idea.

This process also doesn't work for me when I'm doing longer works. Around 10,000 words, my rough idea usually runs out, and I don't know how to proceed. My first novel was written by pantsing most of it, and while I've managed to pull it together, the long editing process that resulted from having a disjointed plan has been very frustrating. It's not a productive use of my time, and one I don't want to repeat with longer projects.

That said, I do like to have those moments of inspiration hit while I'm working on a project that tells me what I was doing could be so much better if I just did this. Sometimes it's only after you start working on something that you realize how to improve it. I also get tidbits of scenes sometimes I need to write down. While I'm committing to outline my next books, I had one of those flashes come to my recently that I can't just ignore.

I plan to turn "Loving You is Wrong" into a novella, and I have started collecting notes in a Scrivener project for that. I've also commission myself some art of the characters to serve as an inspiration. One thing that came to me in the past week is a possible first scene for the novella to introduce the vampire Radic. While I'm not sure I will use it, I want to share this snippet.

His fangs sinking into my neck are the last thing I remember before I died. They were sharp and even though I wanted to struggle against him, I could not resist. He had enthralled me, made my body want to be his meal, and I could not fight back. I was paralyzed, and as he drank all of my life from me, I knew this was the end for me. He was ravenous, and I was vessel to be drunk from. I’m sure I went limp in his grasp after I passed out from blood loss, but I can only assume.

There should have been a light, but there wasn’t one. Instead there was only darkness and the next thing I remember was the smell of freshly dug dirt of the grave they buried me in. He didn’t just take every drop of my blood, he gave me a drop of his own so that I might serve him in death. Not only had he taken my life and all the warmth my body once held, he took my death too. For this gift of a second life, he gave me the hunger that has haunted me every day since, the one I can never completely satisfy that has cut me out of the world and sent me back to my coffin each dawn to sleep far away from that cursed sun.

I have hated [NameToBeDetermined] forever more, and while I was forced to serve him, I did so only because he had bound me to him through this curse. I take no pride in the monster he made me, but I must not forget that from this darkness, I forged my own path. I tempered my anger and my rage into steel that I used for my own benefit. It’s how I broke his hold over me, but I have never been able to break the curse. The hunger, no matter how I try and control it, remains.

I'm hoping that by outlining the novella, I can write it fairly quickly before I start on the much more involved sequel to "Scars of the Golden Dancer." I am unsure though how well that will work, and both books need to have outlines before I can proceed with them.