Precautionary Measures: Outline

[flywoman]

Not too long ago, daasgrrl hosted an interesting post about the writing process for long fics. By chance, I just stumbled upon the outline of Precautionary Measures that I had emailed to my beta. Written scenes are in regular typeface and unwritten scenes are in italics. As is typical for me, the end was finished long before the beginning!

Comments

[daasgrrl]

Oooh, I appreciated seeing this! But... o.m.g. Would you mind saying how many words this ended up being in total? I took a look, but couldn't see it. The way I work, that outline is a work of art, but almost like writing the fic by the time you've done it *g*

Thanks for sharing!

[flywoman]

This particular fic ended up being about 16,000 words, and I've written considerably longer ones. But I think the fact that it was a medical casefile made it much more complicated to plot, thus the need for a detailed outline.

Also, I am giggling now as I read the teaser placeholder since the actual scene turned out to be quite different - in fact, it was an inspired Housian double fake-out :).

[indybaggins]

Oh this is great to see! But how can you write later scenes first? I have a very hard time doing that in terms of character development, I need to go through the whole story along with the character in order for it to develop naturally. Do you just have in your head how they'll be? Or are you working towards a certain scene?

[flywoman]

The short answer is... I don't know, that's just the way it works for me! I have no idea how anyone can start from the beginning and write through to the end without having to go back and make a lot of major changes

[indybaggins]

I'm guessing it's just one of those 'this is how it works for me' things? I could never pull that off, especially for an original story! I do find it very intriguing seeing a glimpse of everyone elses methods :)

[sassyjumper]

Well, this sounds fantastic -- and chock-full of secrets to deduce. Naturally. :)

[flywoman]

Hee, I just reread my own fic because I couldn't remember what all of the secrets actually were...

[cuddyclothes]

Yes, we do work differently! That outline is so detailed, just...wow. For the two fantasy novels I wrote,they had to have solid comic plots with a lot of complications, so for those I wrote full outlines. I had come pretty far with the outline for the third, Bloodsuckers of 1933 when my editor got fired and that was it for the series. They were so hard to write I wouldn't write another one unless I was paid for it.

How's the original story going?

[flywoman]

That's why, the plot was too complicated for me to manage without a detailed outline.

Were you... not paid for the first two?

The original story is going slowly - there is so much backstory and context to imagine even though the story itself is very short. I keep changing my mind about so many things...

[blackmare]

Huh. I don't think I ever saw this story, and what an outline!

My process is a lot messier than this, and ... usually involves Nightdog, because it turns out I'm usually happiest as a collaborator. But the writing-later-parts-first? Happens a lot. Things get mushy in the middle and have to be sorted out.

[flywoman]

I collaborated a lot on this fic, and on Regarding House as well - that is, I did all of the actual writing, but it was very helpful to brainstorm with someone else and get a lot of feedback along the way.