Though I’ve been neglecting my blog–a thing I no longer intend to do–I thought to provide evidence of what I have been working on over the last several months. I won’t publish any of the actual drafts in the blog anymore, but I have been working diligently (if slowly) on putting together a novel. Note: so is the whole world, apparently.
I’m really enjoying the work, and I’m still in communication with the writing group I joined last year (through WriteAboutDragons,) which has taught me innumerable things about my own writing, audience, and the general issues one faces when making stuff up on a large scale.
I’ve got (somewhere around) 12,000 words of actual chapter draft written, I believe, and as I’m not yet finished with chapter 5, so this should be a long–and totally awesome—process.
The video above is a Vine I posted a couple of days ago, and it is of my scene outline notes. A few more pages of notes have been added since then.
4 Responses
I just love seeing your outline in a notebook Elan! I use scrivener a lot for outline, but it’s still very hard for me because I am very much a pantser 😉 SO happy you feel the group is useful. It certainly is for me 😀
I have scrivener, but I haven’t gotten comfortable enough with it to really start using it for note-taking. There’s also something that feels right about taking notes by hand. I’m glad you find it useful, too! I like being able to put my work out and have a “neutral” party give me positive and constructive feedback. Thanks for being a part of it!
This is awesome! I’m proud of you man!
Also, I love Scrivener, though I’m starting to discover that while I outline the general direction of my story, I am actually very much a discovery writer. It is really fun to write toward a goal, but to still have pretty much NOTHING actually figured out as far as details are concerned. Still, for something as detailed as your world (which I love, by the way), I can imagine that making an outline would be very necessary.
I find writing by hand sometimes helps with the creative process too. I should do what you do and get a notebook that is dedicated to outlining and writing ideas.
Maybe I should reinvestigate using Scrivener and combine it with the whole handwritten notes thing I’ve been doing. I’ve done some rudimentary worldbuilding in this notebook, but I find that I don’t want to split the notes in my books (page by page, I mean,) so I’ve got several different notebooks. One has character notes in it, this one is scene outlines, and a third is for worldbuilding. It’d be nice to collect it all in a single place. Scrivener seems like a great place for that.
The project I’m working on with you guys was entirely discovery to begin with, but I realized I need to start holding it together, and outlining just started happening naturally…I’d never outlined like this before and I’m finding it to really focus my attention when I sit down to write actual draft out.
I should be posting something tonight! Finishing chapter V today.