Tangential Outlining

When I started writing, I thought I was a pantser.  Pantser is short for seat-of-your-pants.  That means you sit down to write and words flow.  I attended a short story-oriented online workshop in my early days and that worked.  Then the administrator had a summer of structured writing.  it ended up being the best workshop I’ve been in on line.  We started with the snowflake method and outlined the novel with all kinds of add-ons for characters, weather, setting, plot progression.  All great stuff.  I even conducted the workshop the next year.

Sounds great… but for me it was too much work.  That much structure seemed to overshadow the writing.  So I took what I liked best.  That was taking the overall idea and develop a scene outline.

What is a scene outline?  It’s a few sentence descriptor of all the scenes.  I took that approach and used it to write eight novels.  The scenes kept me on track, but I always found that I would deviate, but the scene outline… which was my version of an outline always kept me headed in the right direction.

In my last draft novel, something crazy happened.  (It’s happened before, but just not as drastically.)  I had my scenes all structured and as I wrote, my fingers rebelled and popped an entirely character in my book.  Now this is the last book of my Warstone Quartet, so I sat there wondering what direction to take.  I really liked the shocking development so I had to go off on a tangent and rewrote the rest of the scenes.  That was half of the book.  The ending’s flavor ended differently as well.

I’m pleased with the result.  What the experience taught me is that while I can be a ‘planner’ (a writer who outlines), I need to hear my creative side and when the opportunity hits become a pantser and let the scene outline go off on a tangent.  It’s okay to deviate.