I have wanted to write for most of my life, starting with handwritten stories I shared with my elementary school friends. I joined NaNoWriMo in 2010 and successfully wrote 50k words once in 2013. While this was a great experience and led me to the decision to write seriously, it showed me how difficult writing could be given our busy lives. To that end, I have given myself some deadlines, which I will discuss in later posts.

What I want to discuss today is planning. When I made my NaNoWriMo attempts, I wrote without outlines and quickly ran into issues where I was unsure were to take the story. I was doomed before I started. Now, I do not want to say that everyone needs to outline, but for me, I need to have a plan, or my story meanders into dead ends that require rewrites to fix.

I am currently pre-outlining a bunch of books; in fact, I am pre-outlining everything I can think of. Space Opera, Zombie Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse Horror, High Fantasy. I want to get all of it written down in synopsis form. I will then pick a few appear fun to develop, and I will go ahead and outline them in full. Outlining will be discussed in later posts, but basically, I will write a sentence for each of the main scenes, then I will work on filling the story between them. At some point, I will have enough story, character, and world to write the full outline. The full outline will be my guide for writing quickly and efficiently, but it will not be used to limit the story if I think of new events or characters while writing the first draft.