Thursday, January 14, 2010

Outlining Your Novel


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Since I got such great response on my livejournal blog about POV and how writers pick which one to use, I thought I'd ask another question to help me along on this new novel. (or maybe more than one question.)

My previous novel, I just sat down and wrote. And wrote and wrote, and daydreamed, and wrote. No outline, no structural planning etc. Hence the need for DRASTIC re-writing when I was finished!!! I ended up having to do the outline AFTER I was done my first draft, and then add about 50,000 words, while ditching a lot of words. I would like to avoid that for this new novel, so I'm going to put some time into an outline this time.

Do you outline your novel? How much outlining do you do?

Do you use a program to help you? Like Scrivener or Storyboard? I was considering Scrivener, but it's only for Mac users.



 I downloaded Storyboard instead and have just started playing around with it. It doesn't have the features of Scrivener, and it's just for outlining, not actually writing the novel.



Any input is greatly appreciated as I attempt to venture into this novel with my eyes wide open.

1 comments:

dmj said...

Thank you for mentioning Scrivener in your post Sandra! I wanted to let you know that we have a video tutorial available that touches on outlining: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/videos/index.html entitled 'Outliner & Synopses'.

'Scrivener for Windows' is on the way too! You can be kept updated by joining our related newsletter: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/about.html#windows

All the best,
David