A few weeks ago I blogged about how I was a proposal writing fool. Well, I'm happy to say that I finished my third proposal late Sunday night and sent it off to my editor. YAY!
In that last blog I talked about how freaking hard outlines were for me. But it's so satisfying when they are done and let me tell you, I DO appreciate them when I go back to work on the book (which I'm doing this week for one of them). I spent all of last weekend outlining and I thought I'd share my process.
It really started before last weekend. For days (sometimes weeks) I brain dump various scenes into a document, cleverly labeled "notes"). When I think I have quite a lot of these scenes I print out the document, get a pair of scissors, and sit on the floor. I cut out each scene and then arrange into an order that makes sense. Like so:
Then I get more paper out and tape the scenes onto the paper, leaving space between each one in case I need to write in more scenes. Like so:
After that, I gather up my pages and park myself at Starbucks for three or four hours putting all this into chapters and making it sound good.
Wah la! It's done (Sorry no pic. Imagine pretty pages with paragraphs and chapter breaks.).
I'm not sure how but somehow this seems to work for me. I only got rid of two of those original scenes from the first brain dump. And yeah, I added a handful more but the majority of the outline came from this.
How do you outline?
Kristina, Miss Delighted to Debut
