In my quest to write 20 novels over the next three years, I’m committed to outlining each one. When I wrote a recent short story for Medium, HEADS, YOU LOSE, I had no outline. Consequently, a lot of rewriting was required, and that was for a 3,000-word story.
Lots of people have already debated the merits of “pantsing” versus “plotting,” so I won’t go into those arguments here. Instead, I’ll find out for myself whether plotting — outlining — gives me an advantage or hinders my creativity.
I didn’t use any fancy software to create my outline, which is still a work in progress. Instead, I created a new Google doc in my WIP folder in Google Drive and started a numbered list. Each number represents a scene.
For now, each scene is described in between two and four sentences. I’m not getting very meta here. I want a broad understanding of the tension in the scene and what it means to the overall story.
Later, I might expand the outline to include more details. Perhaps a spreadsheet…