Huh. I guess I do believe in outlines after all

[commodorified]

So a shocking amount of writing advice I've encountered is about cutting the excess away, and this has rarely been my problem.

I tend to produce first drafts so condensed as to be downright gnomic, and then show them to friends who are kind enough to be informatively bewildered at me until I unpack.

Related to this, I always said I don't outline, at least outside my head. It occurs to me that my first drafts ARE outlines, really. Just, I outline in actual paragraphs.

Huh. That's an oddly useful insight.

In other news I forget where I recently saw someone comment that you can tell the difference between bad allergies and a cold because colds are PAINFUL, but that, sadly, is also very useful information right now.

Comments

[graydon]

This -- that failure of acknowledgement -- is one of the reasons I think Pat Wrede deserves far more recognition than they've had. I may never found any of their writing advice directly[1] useful to me, but they've been absolutely relentless about quoting the last stanza of Kipling's In a Neolithic Age:

Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:—
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!"

for decades now, to the point where "nine-and-sixty ways" is, in some quarters, a useful trope name/tag phrase.

It's important.

(I write down stuff as it comes to me. It's mostly in order and some of it is stuff that has to be got to, once, memorably, nigh 200,000 words later.)

[1] thinking about why not has been plenty helpful.