Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Still Outlining Lights

Written by Kodi Wolf at 10:27 PM

I didn't quite get the outline finished for Lights of Life, but I'm close. I'm mostly just going back through it and filling in the remaining gaps and trying to work out the ending sequence of events, so I should be able to start writing the actual story text soon. I'm hoping that'll up my word count as well, since I seem to write for longer when I'm working on a scene.

My total word count for April was 24,074, which averages out to 802 words per day. My lowest words per day was 124 and my highest was 3,177.

I'm actually getting really excited about finishing the outline and starting on the actual writing. As I've gone back over my notes and outlines for scenes, I've really wanted to stop and work on them. But I also know I need to get the outline finished so I'm not flying blind. I've found it's rather demoralizing when I end up having to rewrite huge chunks because I've forgotten to include something important.

That's the problem I've been running into with all my stories and it's why they all stalled for about 15 years. I got to a point where I didn't know where I was going and then when I figured it out, I realized I needed to rewrite everything that had gone before because the next bits I wanted to write wouldn't make sense without the added setup.

Now that I've gotten 2+ years of daily writing under my belt, I'm hoping to focus that habit into working on my stories in a particular order that will get them done, including the rewrites.

So for Lights, that meant first going through my previous beta-reading comments and figuring out how to fix what some of my readers didn't like (but only where I agreed with them and thought the changes would improve the story).

Then I worked on outlining those changes while figuring out which bits of the original story I wanted to keep and which bits should be cut or rewritten.

And most recently, I've been outlining all the rest of the scenes to the end of the story so I'll know where I'm going when I finally get to the writing.

Doing all that prep work has already shown me where I can drop in bits of foreshadowing that were either lacking before or were in the wrong place.

I've also left a lot of the little details open so I know when I get to the actual writing of each scene, there'll still be plenty for me to discover to make the writing fun and interesting. My characters tend to throw me curve balls anyway, so giving myself that space to explore should hopefully keep me from freaking out when I inevitably go off script.

Well, back to work.