Happy Friday friends! As of last night, I can officially say that I don’t have to give Donald Trump’s campaign any $$$ this month. Because I made my page count goal for the month! A week early! This (blogging=bragging) means I wrote 75 pages in the last two weeks, which I didn’t even know was possible. And while I attribute some of the success to my hard work (and a lingering cold that’s keeping me away from all fun distractions), but of it I attribute to having a detailed outline that I feel really good about.
It’s not that I haven’t been a fan of outlines in the past. This is not a conversion from pantser to plotter. I’ve always been kind of both, depending on the project. But before outlines were kind of like tentative plans. If I can’t figure out something better to write than I’ll stick with this kind of of plans. Or maybe I’d know the climax, but not how the central problem gets resolved.
But for this very drastic revision, I have a chapter by chapter outline. It says what’s going to happen to who when, and how they’ll react – hitting almost all of the five W’s. It means I when I sit down to write, I know exactly what I’ll be writing. I just have to get the words on the page. The story is taken care of. I just need to focus on the words and the characters and (hopefully) all the feels.
Before, I thought this might make me feel bored while writing. Discovery can be such a fun part of the process and a great motivator to keep going. But knowing where I’m going and writing in sequential order is proving great motivation, because there are some scenes I’m just so excited to write. For example, the first smooch in my story is coming up and I’m racing to get to that chapter. That’s how excited I am to write it.
Writers out there are you outliners? If not, why? I’m very curious about everyone else’s process!
Alison Doherty 
I just made an outline too!! It’s not as thorough as yours, just a list of scenes, whether they are written or not. It’s been helpful though! BUT I couldn’t have done the outline at the front end, before I really knew the characters or what the story was about. But now that I’m about a year in, it was begging to be created, and it’s been super helpful. 🙂
Yeah. I think it will be interesting if I ever try to do a big outline before starting a new project. I feel like I would want to try it though, after how nice it is writing with one now.