Offroading

I’m an outline guy. I like to have an outline before I begin a story. If it’s a long or complex story, the outline is written down and sometimes fussed over quite a bit before I begin. That said, I recognize the trap of rigidly following an outline. Sometimes better ideas crop up. Sometimes the characters seize control of the story and drive it somewhere else. Sometimes the flaws in the outline aren’t apparent until well into the actual draft. The outline is, after all, nothing more than a map of where I want to go.

Which means suddenly I’m offroading and hoping my tires can handle the worst of the bumps.

I managed to do the detailed outlining for five more pages of Deep Dish, bringing me to 25 pages fully scripted and pages 26-48 with the detailed outline done. It’s not as quite as much as I’d like, but since I was on business travel with very little time to myself for most of the week, it’s not bad. But the outlining has ground to a halt with the offroading. I just don’t know where I want to go with pages 49 and 50.

I’m sure I’ll eventually figure it out, and I’m convinced that the pages I’ve just finished are better than my original path. But it’s certainly got me stumped for the moment.

Where was that highway again?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 29th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Writing Status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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