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

[recessional]

Mine aren't quite so condensed and I tend to have to go in both directions, but yeah: my first drafts are outlines. I need to tell myself the whole story. And I need to tell it in a way that's still interesting to me, or else I get bored, which is what yon "normal" kinds of outlines tend to be.

The closest I get to normal ones is sometimes having in Scrivener an empty file going "so I still need that scene about the thing to go here" or "something happens between this and previous, no fucking idea what." :P