ext_3545: Jon Walker, being adorable! (Default)
Dira Sudis ([identity profile] dsudis.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] lovesrain44 2009-08-11 12:34 am (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know about the email--it had wound up in my spam folder, I just found it now. :)

I'm afraid I don't outline in a way that is useful to look at after the fact. My outline for chapter one looks like this:

01 - C - Kidnapped [218]
02 - D - Fourteen hours [700]
03 - D - He called Terry [498]
04 - T - Don went down [787]
05 - C - Strange sensation [258]
06 - D - Command post in the dining room [220]
07 - L - Zero Kelvin [295]
08 - D - Things to do [142]
09 - D - In the garage [475]
10 - D - Thirty-six hours [161]
11 - C - Little finger [118]
12 - D - Forty-eight hours [169] {4041}

So as you can see, I was updating and editing it after the fact; when I had things outlined in advance it was roughly the same just a very short reminder of what scene I wanted, with an idea of how I was going to distribute POVs. The actual work of developing the story and the plotting and so on was done mainly in IM - with what wound up being about eight or ten people, by the end - over the course of three years. I would tell out the story, hitting the high points that I knew and going into detail where I had imagined out a whole specific scene, and they would ask questions or point out problems, letting me know what needed work, and so on. Once I started writing, I was trading paragraphs and scenes with my beta (alpha, I guess) readers, and continuing to think out loud to them about where I was going next - making notes sometimes to remind myself, but I was so immersed in the story that I did wind up just holding a lot of it in my head a lot of the time, especially early on when I was writing very fast. I have been given to understand that my process is Not Like Other People's Processes. :)

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