Scrivener Windows Release
As you may or may not remember, I was pimping Scrivener for Windows in the first part of this month. I kept talking about how excited I was that the open beta was going to be released pre-NaNo because the novel I'll be working on is a doozy of a novel that has multiple story lines wandering in and out of spotlight because this is basically two
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Since I keep raving about Scrivener and how much it's going to help me, I'm curious: how do you prewrite? Do you have an outline written out somewhere or just planned in your head? Based solely on what I've seen of your posts, I see you write linearly, so you probably don't need the outlining and scene moving things that make Scrivener so awesome (promise I'm not getting paid to promote it, it's just made me really curious how others do stuff). Me? I've only ever written start to...what I stopped writing for NaNo 2008 and, yeah, it helped, but almost all of that was outlined ahead of time.
Of course, you tend to write more traditional novels while both of my big projects (and it looks like the third one that's brewing is headed the same way) cover a big portion of a single character's life. Yeah, the main plot is fairly simple and easy to identify, but I set up so much in the years previous, that I just don't like leaving that all out of referring to it in either narrative or flashbacks.
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My prewriting is basically just a lot of planning. Getting the characters in my head and imagining the big important scenes. I try to get as much of the story figured out before I start writing. It's kind of like remembering a movie I've never seen and then just writing what happens in that movie.
I like leaving the ending vague, too, when I plan. That way it can happen organically while I'm writing. Or as organically as possible. More often than not, the characters tell me what's going to happen. The last novel I wrote, A Fine Gray Dust, had a very surprising ending. I just suddenly realized, "Oh, really, it's almost over?"
I wrote a story about a character's life... it followed her mainly from the end of high school up until she got a career. It's the most time I've ever covered in a novel, so that was kind of weird to write using my typical methods. :D
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