It should come as no surprise that I follow Facebook pages like Freedom with Writing, Author’s Publish and Writer’s Write, and am a member of one of many NaNoWriMo Groups, and that this image on the left came across multiple of these pages about the same time last night. The quote made me pause and think.
I don’t outline. I’m horrible at outlining. Most of my story ideas come to me out of the blue and are often the middle of the story, not the beginning and definitely not the end. I write the story as it comes to me, as the characters talk. I don’t really have an idea of where they are going or what they will doing in a solid sense. It’s vague. I let the ideas forge ahead on their own.
Sometimes I just write down something a character says and put as a “for later chapter” in my manuscript because I know it will be in there when the time is right.
I know many authors swear by outlining, needing a beginning, a middle and an end all plotted out to reach their goals and for a while I was thinking I must be doing something wrong that I wasn’t creating outlines and working on the story as a straight line until I saw this quote from one of my favorite authors, Diana Gabaldon. She nails it. Like her, I don’t work on or with an outline nor do I work in a straight line. Well, let’s be honest, pretty much everything she says in the quote is how I’ve been writing my WIP. Most didn’t start at the beginning, with the exception of The Wolf Siren, and honestly, her story didn’t really start in the beginning as I have a few short stories related to her elsewhere that I haven’t incorporated in yet, but for the sake of the contest, I forced myself to find a beginning to start with and went from there.
But even now, chapter 5 wrote itself before chapter 3 and 4 were finished. Sections of future chapters are written and waiting for me to catch up to them. The same can be said for my other work in progress that’s posted on the site. That excerpt was written in 2009. I only just figured out the first chapter(s) and got that written. It will be interesting to see where these novels pan out.
How bout you? Do you swear by the outline and plot method, or do you let the writing of the story guide you as you go, writing chapters here and there then getting them to all work together? I’d like to hear other author’s ways of tackling the plot monster.
