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I was cleaning off my desk today and decided to snap a pic of this little WIP outline I had from one of my stories. I really enjoy seeing artists post their works in progress… I like seeing how a piece changes while they’re working on it. I know it doesn’t work too well for writers, so this is as close as it gets :) 

(Also, I am amused at the thought of livestreaming while writing… How many people would be interested in watching me type and delete and retype the same paragraph over and over again for two hours? Because that’s what some of my writing sessions are like. -.-;)

My short stories are usually written in one fell swoop, or over the course of a few days. The long stories need a bit more planning and plotting. I am a strange mix of a “seat of the pants” writer (who just throws caution to the wind and starts writing, hoping for the best) and an outliner (who plans everything before they start writing).

For my longer fics, I plan out the basic idea (so for Anamnesis: Jazz gets lost on a mission and is presumed dead, but is found and recovered years and years later… but with amnesia. Yay tropes!) Then I start writing, usually plotting the story out about a day before I write that section.

As I get to the halfway point, I start doing more outlining. I will have certain beats that I will want to hit, and I know some of them need to be done in a certain order.  So I’ll write the scenes out, and use them as a sort of checklist for writing the next sections. These beats are key scenes or plot points that help move the story along, or that help with foreshadowing/characterization.

In the outline I posted here, you can see that I numbered the scenes, changing the order slightly. This outline starts near the end of Chapter 7 of Anamnesis, and I pretty much stuck with the outline. It’s more of a sketch, since I know what points I wanted to make in each of these scenes. I also didn’t get into any detail about the flashback, since at the time I wrote this outline I didn’t quite have the “what happened” down pat. By the time I got to item #8 on this list, it was all figured out, and I just inserted it.

Anyway, not sure if that’s interesting to anyone, but I wanted to save this little scrap of history from that first long fic I posted. :) Also, check out my awful handwriting.