The writing process is something that everyone has to figure out for themselves. For me, as a computer professional by day, it turns out that handwritten index cards are the best way to flesh out a scene list or outline. Part of this may be age, but I spend so much time with computers that outlining manually with cards allows me be more creative. There is something "real" about physically writing on cards/

I thought I would describe my experience working with index cards, as I am starting my first novel and am excited to see how using index cards speeds my process.

I wrote out a scene list a few days ago, with four early scenes as follows:

• A visitor brings rumors of people mysteriously disappearing in other communities.
• The protagonist is on top of a tower in the evening and sees the lights of distant villages go out.
• The protagonist's father and community defenders travel west to investigate.
• One member of the expedition returns with horrible news, but no knowledge of what happened to the others.

The idea is that a problem is introduced and then quickly escalates to the point where the protagonist has to act. With a word processor, I have to think about what I want to do, how I want the story to flow, but with index cards, I can jumble things around quickly and repeatedly to see if something I did NOT think of stands out. I have reordered scenes numerous times and found some interesting combinations. The current order of the four scenes is:

• A visitor brings rumors of people mysteriously disappearing in other communities.
• The protagonist's father and community defenders travel west to investigate.
• The protagonist is on top of a tower in the evening and sees the lights of distant villages go out.
• One member of the expedition returns with some horrible news, but no knowledge of what happened to the others.

I love the extra tension that the scenes create in this order.  Part of the creative process is changing order, and these scenes might end up as flashbacks later in the book or dropped entirely, but that is a subject for a different post.

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.