Every year I seem to take the outlining process just a little bit further. Sometimes this means that I have pictures for my characters. Other years I will roll up roleplaying character sheets so I can "fudge" the fight scenes by just running a scene of Hunter: The Reckoning (not that I'm planning to do that this year, oh no...). This year, I opted to do a full timeline of my novel before I ever started the thing. This, I think, is going to be a seriously useful device.
Novel Title: Magdalena Crane, Rogue Zombie Hunter
I'm pretty sure this book needs a solid outline and timeline if for no other reason than it's set in 19th century US and Europe with cowboys, steamships, zombies, China, and Lesbian Zombie Exterminators. Also, I'm aiming at a minimum of 90,000 words next month, so I need a pretty solid idea of where I'm starting and where I'm going so that I don't get too stumped mid-novel.
Right now, most of my chapters have a specific day that associates with the content of the chapter. A few happen over several days and one or two take the place of several years or a month or more. The goal after all of this, however, is going to be to keep all of this side information together. I have a couple of old NaNos from past years that I don't have any of the support documentation for and have had to reverse engineer things like dates and timelines and maps for just to make things make sense when I go back to edit. Ugh.
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Last year I used the Ywriter4 and Ywriter5 programs to write each scene. I ended up putting the day & time for the scene into the scene title, so I could keep everything straight. And I ended up trying to put one day into each chapter, but some chapters were very thin, and others split one day across two chapters.
ReplyDeleteThis year, I'm thinking of copying Robert B. Parker. That is, 60-70 four-page scenes with a chapter number heading each one, and no titles, and who cares how much of the day/week/month they take up.
Logan