Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Steve, I'm wondering how extensive your outlines are. Sounds like you go to a significant amount of detail?
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My outlines tend to be 2-3 pages of abbreviated sentences describing general and specific story details, no dialogue, and behind-the-scenes action that impacts what happens in the scene depicted, or how it came to be. I break up the outline into paragraphs, and generally 1 paragraph equals one chapter of the book. (They tend to be fairly uniform in length as well, an aspect that I admit I haven't figured out to this day!)
The outline is further backed up with notes about the characters, settings, relevant science/technology... usually less than a page, but sometimes more (such was the case with
Verdant Skies).
Once the outline is done, I can use it like a story template, dictating the overall direction of the writing while still leaving me plenty of room to be creative about settings, descriptions and dialogue. Once I start writing, armed with all that, I rarely run into problems or roadblocks, only occasionally when trying to find the right way to describe and pace a scene, and proceed fairly smoothly from start to finish.
By the way: The rewrite I mentioned earlier is fixed, and just requires further embellishment before I proceed with writing.