Friday Finds Outline

Friday Finds Outlines

This week has been so crazy  and productive ya’ll, lots of ups and downs in terms of my personal life and writing.  We finalized some vacation plans, Seattle comic-con in March, both ended up in the ER, got good cancer news, and I’m Still actually using and following a writing schedule which I’m so happy about. The writing session is for writing only, so no plotting, planning, fleshing out characters, or during all the things I do when I should be writing. My mind is at place where it’s ready to write, but not quite sure where to start. I’m not gonna lie to ya’ll, this week I’ve written a lot of single scenes that I like a lot but I’m not quite sure where to put.  I’m struggling to get the order down. I want to continue to set myself up for successful writing sessions, and since no planning or plotting can occur in these writing session,  my outline has to be straight and clear to guide me on the path, and it’s just not ya’ll.

My outline has become an invaluable  item, but it’s also needs to bee an evolving one. My outline started as a short two sentence chapters summary. From that summary a very rough draft was formed. Now that I’m in the editing trenches, and my rough draft is going through the refining process, so must my outline.  Instead of giving just giving me the right direction for what I should type next, it also needed to tell me why I needed to type it.

Arm with a more concrete theme I started with my plot embryo. If you haven’t used or know what a plot embryo is, it’s a writing tool used to map of the hero journey of your story, check out this video here for more.  After i had a plot embryo for not only my  my story but my two main characters.

With this general idea I moved on to structure and with another banger on the writing 101 youtube playlist, How To Outline by katytastic. The best things about this video is she goes through the whole structure with a story made just for the video it’s really helpful to see this practically applied. This is also the outline I look at most during  my writing sessions.

Next, I’ve talked briefly about this book, but Story Genius  by Lisa Cron. Her method while a little harder to get into is so much depth to it. It really helped me open up the story, and made sense of the order for me.

So the three ways I used to strengthen my outline?

I made a Plot embryo to help my shape my overall idea & flesh out Character motivation

I Used 3 act 9 block 27 chapters structure to plot out the story and work out my scenes

Story Genius method to order the scenes, and make sure the drive the story forward

Writing was it was easier the this week than last and now I’m kind of looking forward to my writing time. I’m gonna ride this excitement as long as I can, and treat each writing session as if I’m clocking in at my day job. There are some many ways to outline a story, these are just the ones that have really made a difference for me. Hope this helps you all out as we all dive into 2019. Happy writing ya’ll and don’t forget to create, hustle and love yourself.