outlining

Philosophy Jokes and New Writing

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

After spending all of last week down with the sickness (i.e., strep), I’m feeling much better as the final week of the third quarter begins.  Spring Break is close, the weather is turning spring-like, and all the students are complaining about things like having to take exams and come to class and do work and why is there such a thing as school anyway?  Admittedly, students complain regardless of the time of year, so I’m not sure that’s an indicator of the arrival of spring.

Spring has also brought with it a renewed writing energy.  I’ve been in a bit of a prose slump lately, focusing more on writing songs (though even that has slowed to a trickle in the past month or so), so when I woke up with an idea for a Hazzard story today, I decided it was time to run with it.

I don’t know where in the Hazzard timeline this story takes place quite yet (after Book 2, at the very least).  It may end up bumping Books 3, 4, 5, etc., further down the road.  It might just be a short story or a novella, I don’t know yet.  I have been doing some broad-strokes plotting, which is generally all the more specific my plotting gets.  I thought I’d share a bit of this roughest of outlines with you, just for fun:

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As you can see, it’s far from a complete, detailed outline, but I only started working on it this morning.  More will come with time.

I’m also pretty pleased with the working title, The Long Fall into Darkness.  Is that subject to change?  You betcha!  As a working title, though, it’s got some legs.

Plottin’ and Schemin’

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

I’ve…never been good at organization.  If any of my previous English teachers are reading that sentence, they are muttering to themselves that it is the single greatest understatement in human history, ranking up there with “the Beatles were a pretty good band” and “maybe Hitler was not a very nice man.”  I’d like to blame it on my ADD (like that guy from AWOLNATION, who capitalizes the entire band name for some reason?  Maybe that’s the ADD’s fault, too), and it’s probably a significant culprit, but executive function has just never been my bailiwick.  It bleeds over into my planning and plotting on a book, too.  A few months ago, I wrote a guest post for Hart’s Romance Pulse where I talked about plotting by the seat of my pants.  I’m not going to completely rehash what I’ve already said pretty clearly somewhere else, but I did want to address it a bit here on my own site.

Some authors, of course, craft very detailed, very specific outlines, with plot beats planned and scripted in a rigid text that is to be adhered to like a holy book.  I am not of their ilk.  A lot of my plot beats are created in the spur of the moment, following a general theme of, “I’m kinda stuck at the moment, what if someone started shooting at the protagonist?”  It’s served me pretty well so far.

Generally speaking, when I’m writing, I’ve got a couple of plot points that I know have to happen.  I usually know how the story will end.  What will happen between my starting point, those important plot beats, and the ending?  Only God knows for sure, and He likes to make me work it out for myself.

Mostly, it’s a lot of bad guys shooting at the hero.