March Madness
I want to preface this by announcing that Kingdom of Rage is back on sale on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords!
Much of the last month I've been hemming and hawing over the The Oceanus Project's outline. Like any creative project, what you start out with is vastly different than the final product. If you're new to book outlining, there are two ways you can write a novel: first, you can create a cast of characters and a theme and launch head first into a story, without knowing how the book is going to end until you actually write it. The second is a little more complicated: create an outline of the entire book, with a rough sketch of how you want each chapter to travel. The later is much more sensical in my case because action thrillers utilize red herrings and multiple subplots, making them much easier to plan.
There are multiple stages of outlining. Sounds monotonous but it's actually the most important part because it allows you to put multiple ideas down onto paper—in this case the screen. I may have ten different paths the story could go, and I need to narrow it down to one. A week from now I may decide that the first path doesn't work. This happened a day ago when I realized that I had a serious plot hole in the opening scene. If I missed it, I would have written gobs of pages only to have to edit or delete out entire sections. What a waste of time that would be.
The first stage is deciding what the general theme is and how can I incorporate the last book into this one. That's difficult because the last book is set in stone whereas I have flexibility with the current one.
Once you choose the theme, then you get into the nitty-gritty: the characters, subplots, and plausibility and entertainment value of events. If the scene isn't exciting, I edit it until it is or I scrap it.
The third part is the worst: second-guessing your work and running the outline through the emotional meat-grinder. Does the story work? Will people read it? Is it dreck? Self-doubt is a normal and sobering part of the process. But it keeps it real.
Where I am at now is in the plausibility stage. I found an enormous plot hole in the first section and need to work through it or come up with an alternate scene. Solving this could take five seconds or five weeks.
Some novelists can push out books faster than a Taylor Swift relationship, but I'm not one of them. Below is how I feel.
Much of the last month I've been hemming and hawing over the The Oceanus Project's outline. Like any creative project, what you start out with is vastly different than the final product. If you're new to book outlining, there are two ways you can write a novel: first, you can create a cast of characters and a theme and launch head first into a story, without knowing how the book is going to end until you actually write it. The second is a little more complicated: create an outline of the entire book, with a rough sketch of how you want each chapter to travel. The later is much more sensical in my case because action thrillers utilize red herrings and multiple subplots, making them much easier to plan.
There are multiple stages of outlining. Sounds monotonous but it's actually the most important part because it allows you to put multiple ideas down onto paper—in this case the screen. I may have ten different paths the story could go, and I need to narrow it down to one. A week from now I may decide that the first path doesn't work. This happened a day ago when I realized that I had a serious plot hole in the opening scene. If I missed it, I would have written gobs of pages only to have to edit or delete out entire sections. What a waste of time that would be.
The first stage is deciding what the general theme is and how can I incorporate the last book into this one. That's difficult because the last book is set in stone whereas I have flexibility with the current one.
Once you choose the theme, then you get into the nitty-gritty: the characters, subplots, and plausibility and entertainment value of events. If the scene isn't exciting, I edit it until it is or I scrap it.
The third part is the worst: second-guessing your work and running the outline through the emotional meat-grinder. Does the story work? Will people read it? Is it dreck? Self-doubt is a normal and sobering part of the process. But it keeps it real.
Where I am at now is in the plausibility stage. I found an enormous plot hole in the first section and need to work through it or come up with an alternate scene. Solving this could take five seconds or five weeks.
Some novelists can push out books faster than a Taylor Swift relationship, but I'm not one of them. Below is how I feel.
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