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

[dira]

Yeah, a while back I worked out that telling the story out to someone is kind of my zero draft--I like to do it in chat so I have a transcript to refer to, because I do a lot of figuring-out that way and tend to feel out the arc of the story that way, figuring out the important bits to make it a satisfying story when it's described.

I do like to outline, though--mostly just a list of events that need to happen, which can be very vague initially and gets more concrete as I get closer, so that I'll have specific scenes worked out two or three in advance, and after that it's a series of bullet points that happen in some way and in some order yet to be determined.

[mmegaera]

I was a much better plotter when I had someone to do that with -- unfortunately, she now has Parkinsons and is no longer to help me in this respect (which is the *least* sucky thing about her having come down with Parkinsons). And I haven't been able to find anyone else to fill this role.