I've now heard you mention your opinions on outline in several places (at least I think I have, maybe I've read the same thing several times? but I could have sworn it's come up in the YahooGroup? Anyway)
I never used to outline, and in fact my earliest writings are completely off-the-cuff. With my largest project, however, I had to develop an outline - I'm working on part of it with another person, and we were getting massively lost as to who does what where. But even though I have a major events timeline (which spans sixty years, ten of which are actually in the books we're writing) and know how and in what order things happen, I still get blindsided by plot and characters.
Characters, especially, keep popping up and taking the story in different directions. And though the major events still happen roughly in order (mostly the A-leads-to-B sort), how they happen changes, sometimes drastically, and how these events affect the characters changes - thereby changing the "feel" of the story, and its meaning, in ways I rarely expect.
So, I guess, I do outline ahead of time, but that doesn't mean I know who my characters are... or what they're going to do.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2004-12-07 05:41 am (UTC)I never used to outline, and in fact my earliest writings are completely off-the-cuff. With my largest project, however, I had to develop an outline - I'm working on part of it with another person, and we were getting massively lost as to who does what where. But even though I have a major events timeline (which spans sixty years, ten of which are actually in the books we're writing) and know how and in what order things happen, I still get blindsided by plot and characters.
Characters, especially, keep popping up and taking the story in different directions. And though the major events still happen roughly in order (mostly the A-leads-to-B sort), how they happen changes, sometimes drastically, and how these events affect the characters changes - thereby changing the "feel" of the story, and its meaning, in ways I rarely expect.
So, I guess, I do outline ahead of time, but that doesn't mean I know who my characters are... or what they're going to do.