I don’t need no stinking outlines…Ha!

Some writers plan. They research, they plot, they outline. Everything has an order and a place in the story before the first sentence is written.  The result is a well fleshed out story that needs to be trimmed back and have all the unnecessary bits removed.

I remember preparing and writing English and Literature papers in high school. We had to turn in notes cards, an outline, a rough draft, etc.  My prep work was always horrible. My note cards were very few in number, my outline was made up the morning it was due.

My rough draft for what was supposed to be a ten page paper was four pages long. I didn’t know how to flesh out a piece with descriptiveness and extra details. Short, sweet, and two the point was my writing style.

Now that I can write what I want, when I want, I’ve managed to fall somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. I still don’t plan. When I start a book, I have a vague notion of where I want it to go but no idea how on earth it’s going to get there.

When I was finishing Shadowed Strength, I got stuck. My heroine Melanie had a plan. She told the hero Jeremy what the plan was, off-scene. But nobody told me. It took me several days of writing for the plan to fall together for me as the story moved on. I really didn’t have all the details until they unfolded.

So I guess my writing style is more fly by the seat of my pants, rather than purposeful and planned. As I write, I see the scenes in my head like a movie. Then I think “Oh! This should happen next!” or “Wait! I want this situation to end like this. Now how do I get there?”

Luckily, I can keep everything straight enough in my head that the scenes flow well and don’t end up a  jumbled mess. Who needs outlines? Ha!

How do you write?