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matt_doyleWord count: 57.
Not done for the day by any stretch, but admittedly the prose has been slow. I have a 15-point outline. I have 8 named characters, and ideas about what they want and how they act. A couple of them may get cut if they're not necessary. I have a setting, and a culture, and at least two well-defined subsets of the culture, which are directly relevant to the plot, and about which I am not ready to talk yet.
I have my central problem, and it's a thorny one. I don't yet know how my heroine resolves it. But that's okay, I don't want my outline to tell me that. I want my heroine to do it, as I get to know her better. She'll tell me how she would define a happy ending, and her choices will show me whether or not she gets it, in the end.
I have several very bad first lines. It's time to ignore them, and work from my outline on the parts I understand the best. I can work back to the opening from that.
Writers out there: how do you approach starting a story? How much marinating and percolating takes place before it's time to put words on the page? To what extent do you outline the shape of your story, and how much do you leave to logical extrapolation as you move along?
Not done for the day by any stretch, but admittedly the prose has been slow. I have a 15-point outline. I have 8 named characters, and ideas about what they want and how they act. A couple of them may get cut if they're not necessary. I have a setting, and a culture, and at least two well-defined subsets of the culture, which are directly relevant to the plot, and about which I am not ready to talk yet.
I have my central problem, and it's a thorny one. I don't yet know how my heroine resolves it. But that's okay, I don't want my outline to tell me that. I want my heroine to do it, as I get to know her better. She'll tell me how she would define a happy ending, and her choices will show me whether or not she gets it, in the end.
I have several very bad first lines. It's time to ignore them, and work from my outline on the parts I understand the best. I can work back to the opening from that.
Writers out there: how do you approach starting a story? How much marinating and percolating takes place before it's time to put words on the page? To what extent do you outline the shape of your story, and how much do you leave to logical extrapolation as you move along?
