Saturday, August 18, 2012

well, THIS is annoying

I've posted before about how I "outline" -- it turns out it's just not as simple as writing out an "outline" and then writing the book. No. I have to start writing the book first, get to a roadblock, stop, start writing the "outline"  (which usually goes just a little further along than the roadblock I encountered in the book), stop, go back to the book and write until the next roadblock, then back to the "outline," WHICH I THEN USUALLY HAVE TO EDIT to match what the book is doing, lather, rinse, repeat. Christ in a sidecar. In my next life I'm going to be one of those linear thinkers. My "outline" for South of Nowhere is currently almost 1/3 the length of the MS. There's gotta be a better way.

Oh yeah, and: it appears that some agents want a synopsis sent with a query letter, so at some point I'll have to find the time to get the "outline" I wrote for Nine Days into some sort of non-embarrassing shape. I need an assistant.

1 comment:

  1. My outline for my latest is at almost 60,000 words so far, and David says he's heard of 200 page outlines for novels. So it's not, as Tom Jones once said, unusual.

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