Something to Try

 

A few weeks ago I came across this blog post by SheWrites.com (and was featured in HuffPo) called 52 Things—Ideas for 2015 in it, the author Brooke Warner, details fifty-two things authors should do in 2015. It’s a really great post and I highly recommend you check it out. One of the greatest things she mentions however is #26.

Map a book you love. It will teach you a lot to outline a book you’ve read more than once to see how another author thinks about structure, scenes, and narrative arc.

Outlining has always been a struggle for me, and even though I’ve already taken the time to outline the majority of book 2, I can’t help but want to re-evaluate my plans and I think mapping a book I love will help me out in my outlining efforts and hopefully in the future as well. If it goes well, I may map out a few books I love, in varying genres to really give myself a thorough look at different authors, different types of genres and storylines and what they all have in common, if anything, and how they differ. It’s going to be a really fun and exciting challenge for myself and I’m going to spend much of February working on that, as well as maybe updating my outline for the sequel to my current work-in-progress.

I still have every intention of reading my February author, Gillian Flynn and Sharp Objects as this was recommended to me by a friend of mine, and like the Reading Franzen posts these will go up Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, though hopefully at the usually scheduled 0830 time that most of my blogs go up at (assuming Ms. Flynn uses actual chapter breaks I think we’ll be fine).

Filed under: writing Tagged: author, books, outline, shewrites.com, writing [image error]