now, i’ve written nothing of consequence, so what i say has little in the way of real, actual gravitas, but on i’ll go, thus: outlining is wildly amusing, and does little but help clarify my ideas and provide the often-needed hammer to break through any blocks, of writer-variety, i might find along the way. good stuff, yes?

i haven’t read all the comments here as closely as i should, but this is meant more as a tally in the “hooray for outlines” column.

write on.

That said, working on the summaries of the second and third volumes of the trilogy I’m writing seems to have made the task of Figuring Out What Happens Next somewhat less fraught than it usually is.

ya’ll are awesome, by the way.

I definitely wrote my way out of trouble, figuring out what was going to happen by writing it. And if it didn’t work, deleting and starting over. It’s can be a slow way to write. But I learned a lot doing it.

I say forge ahead anyway you know how. You’ve got fifty thousand words now, right? It would be foolish not to get to the end.

Maybe you should just start writing from the point in the outline where you get stuck so you have something like this:

Dee meets Sandra a killer with cold eyes

Dee finds the alligator but can’t convince it to go with her

[outline outline outline then when stuck start actually writing]

The egg was golden. That was weird. Dee had done her research and learned that alligator eggs aren’t all the same colour—there’s variation—but golden wasn’t one of them.

She scratched at the shell. It wasn’t paint.

[keep writing the story]

Then when you’ve figured out where your story’s going and what the end is you can go back and write the outlined parts.

Does that make sense?

I definitely would NEVER write a trilogy again without immensely detailed planning. I also plan to keep a style sheet for each character with physical details so that every time i mentioned hair or eye colour, stature etc I wrote it down, so that by the third book, I didn’t live in fear of getting it wrong, because the characters do morph a bit in your head, especially with book cover illustrations and that sort of thing.

like justine, taking a squiz at the outline when i’m struggling helps lots. i’ve progressed much faster with this wip (the first time i’ve written with an outline) then i ever have before.

Except not always. Sometimes I outline just fine, and it all works well ‘on paper’ but then when I try to write it like hte outline, it dones’t work at all. And then I don’t know what to do. Correction: then I’m still figuring out what to do.