Fiction Scribe

Every author has his or her own way of doing things. Some start with a character. Some start with a place. Others start with an event like a war or an explosion. From then on it becomes more complicated. Some write longhand, others on a computer, and some on the back of their hand to be transferred to some other meduim later. Then there’s whether you write straight through or jump around in your plot as inspiration strikes.

There is no “best” way to do any of it other than what is best for the writer. However, the only way to find out what is best for you is to explore your options and see what fits.

Using an outline can be quite helpful, especially when you feel you are lacking a sense of direction in your piece of fiction. With NaNo now in full swing, I’m glad I wrote a rough outline of the first one or two chapters so I can crash ahead full throttle and then slow down a bit later.

However, does one have to outline? Certainly not. But should one outline? Well…

On one side you have the purists who have the “the story will write itself/the story will take me on a ride” philosophy. On the other side, you have those who use the scene description format for every single scene… I’m always impressed by people on that side.

I’ve tried both extremes and have found what works for me is to just start writing. I generally have a good enough idea in the beginning to write anything from one chapter to the first quarter or third of the story. But, when I get far enough along in a story, I know certain things have to be done for the story to be complete. That’s when I whip out my handy-dandy notecards (lovely because you can rearrange them as you please and see how the story would go if this came before that…) and have one notecard per important event.

That’s just my way of doing it, which I found through exploring the many ways of outlining. I highly recommend exploring because what you’re doing now make work for you, but you might just find something (or come up with something yourself) that makes things go that much more smoothly.

Just in case you want to try out going scene by scene, this is the format I used for scene descriptions:

Setting:
Intro Characters:
Other Characters: (already introduced characters)
Scene Description: