Everything is better when it's in rainbow!

[meaganspooner]

I spent my weekend (and my birthday... and the two days since my birthday...) outlining my first draft of THE IRON WOOD. Granted, I have had some other things to do, like go out to dinner with my friends on my birthday, and attempt to go see the Tim Burton exhibit downtown today only to be turned away by the huuuuge line, and console ourselves

Comments

[acmaxwell]

I definitely plan on using post-its/notecards when I revise. I especially like how you color-coded different aspects of each scene.

[meaganspooner]

I've discovered that I'm a really visual person. Yeah, I wrote the damn book, but I didn't really KNOW it very well until I could see it all at once in one place, laid out like that.

[acmaxwell]

I definitely know that feeling.

[katzhang]

This is so cool! Man, I wish I had the gumption (and lovely colorful stickynotes!) to do this!

But no...I make boring old timelines instead :P

Revising isn't so bad once you really throw yourself into the process. It gets easier as you go along!

[meaganspooner]

The sticky notes were retardedly expensive here (they are not in the U.S.) and so I wandered around to a bunch of different stores with my long-suffering housemate, who ended up finding me some decently cheap ones. I kept insisting that I needed them to be multicolored, which didn't help!

Glad to know that the revising gets easier as you go -- today will be DAY ONE of actual rewriting. Not looking forward to it!

[savannahjfoley]

I loved this post, particularly because of the pictures! I'm about to do my own outlining for condensing my series, but I'm a bullet-points kind of girl. Maybe when my office is set up I can reserve a wall for the post its though; they look so fun!

[meaganspooner]

Thank you, Sav! I normally can't really do much with pictures because writing is not exactly a visually stimulating activity. So I was perhaps disproportionately excited to actually get to take pictures of something.

Let me know how your outlining goes, and if you stumble across any gems of advice... this is definitely one area in which I am completely inexperienced.

[snowscythe]

It's really cool to see this process! I feel like this post-it outlining technique may be applicable to different types of writing projects as well. Did you do an outline on paper as well? And out of curiosity, are the events represented by green post-it notes more or less equivalent in page length, or do they vary a lot?

[meaganspooner]

I was actually just talking about this with my friend Brendan, as I was explaining this process and making him drag me all over Melbourne looking for cheap post-it notes. It works extremely well for fiction and non-fiction, essays, scientific papers, reports, etc. The beauty of it is that you can see the structure SO clearly, and change it around with no effort, and actually see what effect that change is going to have on later points. It's super helpful.

The post-its, unfortunately, represent a range of lengths. I wish that I could have had a bunch of different-sized ones, so I could have longer post-its to represent longer scenes, but alas, I did not. In general though, the longer the scene, the more writing on the post-it -- and usually the more writing on the pink and blue post-its, as well. Not a universal rule, but it does help me see whether the scenes are serving more than one purpose or if they're just sitting there uselessly (and therefore need to be cut).

[journeynorth]

I've heard of the notecarding/post-it method and I tried it once but it didn't work for me. I believe the reason it didn't was because I didn't know what I wanted to write, though. As I was trying to fill out notecards, I was failing madly since I had no idea what the story was about. So I threw 'em all out. But that was a looong time ago.

I would definitely try it after finishing a draft, though! For writing I usually do a vague one or two page outline (or it stays confined to my brain, like my current WIP) and then I just write. It would definitely help to have a visual aid while revising though--I think I'd be lost if I tried to do it otherwise. Condensing scenes into one or two sentences seems to be the best way to go about it, so when I do get to revision (I'm totally confident I will now :o) hehe) I'll definitely give it a try.

[meaganspooner]

You seriously have no idea how happy it makes me that you're making such progress. In part I just know how that FEELS, you know? After years of getting basically nowhere, when I finally buckled down and started really working it felt amazing. So I know the sense of accomplishment that brings.

Anyway--I think you and I have similar outlining/pre-story methods. I tend to write down a few key things, just to be sure I don't forget them, and then just go. My "outlines" are not so much outlines as they are scattered idea fragments that would make absolutely no sense except to me.