Is it hard to get started? Do you have no idea when to outline, how, or if you even need it? The everyday pantser may not need an outline while the planner may have another entire novels worth of notes, plot points, character pages, and sub detail that will never make it into the novel. The key to planning your own workflow is trial and error. But having guidelines to reference can help to save you hours, days, maybe even years of figuring out what works for you by seeing what works for others.
It took me years to figure out what my workflow should look like. And though I certainly don't have it down perfectly yet, I'm finding more every day that helps. Each time I write a book, or create a world it is just a little faster as I refine my own process.
No one's process will ever look the same as another's. But in building your own workflow I encourage you to look at other's processes and use them to help guide you towards your own path. In the spirit of that today, we'll take a look at my workflow for creating Hollows. Hollows is my debut novel, though certainly not the first, fifth, or even tenth novel I've written. Over the years I developed my style, writing habits, and outlining process until I found something that works. It took me from the fifteen years I've spent writing my first novel still without success, to the just two years it took to plot, outline, write, edit, beta, professional edit, and begin the self-publishing process of Hollows.
So how did I outline Hollows?
Pre-work
Hollows started as a completely pants novel one day, under a challenge with my cousin back in twenty-twelve. I'd just started working my first job as a fast-food cashier, and he'd been telling me about completing NANOWRIMO the previous year. Being competitive in our younger years we'd challenged each other to complete NANO, and I'd set to putting words to screen on an old laptop. It was close, and the object I had in my hands at the end of the thirty-day challenge was anything but good, but I'd completed it. I spent a few months after that, basking in the rays of having finally pushed myself to finish a book, as I'd never gotten far enough to put the words ~fins~ on any of my projects up until that point. While several attempts to edit and push the book to a final state were made over the next few months the manuscript inevitably ended up shelved.
Beginning the Project
Fastforward to twenty-twenty-one, nine years later, and the decision was made to try and publish one of my books. I had many to choose from, as I'd amassed quiet a lot of stories over the years, but Hollows stood out to me. It had a lot of faults and told a quiet frankly boring story about a teenage girl with two love interests, a vampire and a werewolf, (ah the twenty-twelves) and she was 'special' somehow. The story involved a serial killer, and a Jackal and Hyde character. The last names were all puns, the vampire's was Day, the werewolf's was Moon, the Jackal and Hyde character was Hyde, the main character and her best friend were Nightmare and Dream. It was definitely written by someone enamored with the twilight craze of the early two-thousands and no skill with story writing.
So with nine years of experience under my belt now, I set to picking apart the old manuscript into the bare bones of what I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to burn.
I made a bullet list of everything that was being kept on a fresh document and spent the first month of its creation just adding and adjusting it. Tweaking parts of the story to fit my new vision. No longer a teen vampire centric inspired drama, it was now a new adult murder mystery with a heavy supernatural influence. The main character wasn't being introduced to the world, she was now part of it. With that new direction came a lot more creative freedom.
Once I had an idea of what the story would look like, I spent a week fleshing out the characters and their personalities and connections. Much of these changed as the story progressed and the characters took on lives of their own, but it was a really good starting point. I fleshed out our villain, their motivations, and everything that was going on behind the scenes before ever touching what was happening with our main cast.
After that I sat with my notes on the villain, and a few diagrams of plotting structures and started tweaking something reminiscent of a three-act structure. For this I used a site called Millinote quiet frequently to move things around and keep references up. The site was honestly pretty helpful, but the same effect can be created with a giant board and a bunch of sticky notes and print outs. I'm just lazy. I spent about a week going back and forth between my notes and the three-act structure until I had a set of events and interactions that felt right to me. At this point everything was mostly haphazard notes, bullet points, or long explanations as to a character's motivation or backstory, and all the little changes that were made. It was kind of a mess.
However, I'd now spent nearly two months with these characters, sprinkling in little test interactions and exercises to get a feel for them and how they worked together. So it was time to sit down and type up the outline!
The Outlining Itself
With all of the preparation I'd put in before outlining I knew the characters pretty well already, and I had cleaned up my notes into something followable and digestible, this in and of itself could have been considered the outline but I like a full breakdown. I wanted something more to use. So on a fresh screen I set to paragraphing everything. This included information that only I, the writer, would know. Each chapter got at least one, if not more paragraphs detailing what would be happening, why, any secrets I'd need to sprinkle in, any dialogue I thought needed to be said, etc. This process took me about three weeks, and I didn't finish it until midway through October. I had the intention to use NANOWRIMO again to motivate myself to write. I wanted the finish product out as fast as possible and felt that I'd done enough legwork to make it so.
But, oh boy, was I wrong.
As I wrote and the characters developed, as they interacted and I allowed some dialogue to flow naturally things, happened. Things I hadn't planned for, and chemistries that were complete surprises. This isn't a bad thing. But it meant that the outline itself had to be constantly updated with any new information throughout the process. I think I was still updating the outline weeks after I'd finished the initial draft at the bare end of November. And more still as things later came back from beta's and critique partners.
My outlining process is super detailed, but that's how I like it. It also doesn't end until I'm through at least my first or second round of beta's, because people can pose questions I never thought about.
The key I've found for my outlining and writing process is to keep myself on a schedule. I mentioned each of the timeframes above because those were the deadlines I gave myself. A month to digest, a week to flesh characters out, a week to type up bullet points and rough draft the idea of the direction, three weeks to type up the main outline, and a month to get the finished draft zero.
The End Result
By the end of that I'd somehow managed to push myself from years of drafts, re-writes, re-drafts, and so on to just around three months of work to have something that was, for all intents and purposes a finished draft.
For me the breakdown went something like this, give or take a bit:
1 Month of Brainstorming
What was I keeping?
What was I changing?
What was I adding?
What kind of story did I want to tell?
Mood boards
Music selections/playlists
1 Week of Refinement
Character bios
Villain motivation
Major events
1 Week of Planning/tweaking
Were there any plot holes?
What looked weak?
Was there anything that could be done better?
What Act Structure was I using?
3 Weeks of Outlining
Chapter descriptions
Checking flow
Making sure there are no empty moments
4 Weeks of Writing Draft Zero
I found that breaking down the initial hurdles and giving them achievable timeframes really helped to motivate me and held me accountable. I didn't meet every deadline, but just the act of having it there glaring me down really helped me to get the outline and in the end the piece finished. Outlining a story for me isn't just about sitting down and writing up a bullet list of events and then writing those out later. It's about doing the leg work to have all the data and events, filling in all the gaps, and getting an overview of events down.
This meant that before I worked on a chapter or scene, I could read a single paragraph and have all of the majorly important details, from subtexts, to clues, to room descriptions and order of events. This in turn would help me form the picture quickly and precisely before typing up the initial draft. It also provided a quick book overview of the whole shebang, meaning if there was something I needed to know earlier or later that too was less than ten minutes of reading away.
In closing I hope this look at my process was helpful. Perhaps in the future I'll be able to provide a much more in depth look at my process. Happy travels on your own writing journey!
Until tomorrow!
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