Epic Wednesday – A Mega, Macro Outline
On planning, notecards, lots of writing, and Viking longships...
Hello again and happy Epic Wednesday!
I’ve been a real busy bee planning out the whole Ruon Chronicles series . I’m halfway between a planner and a discovery writer when it comes down to sitting down and doing the work, but for this big project I need to be more of a planner before I get three quarters of the way through the series and then get stuck!
Notecards! More notecards! Moar notecards!
Starting with a macro outline of the whole series, I’m now moving on to a macro outline per book. This will then be broken down into parts – mostly according to the point of view character – and finally into chapters. This means that I’m doing a few passes of the whole series.
Once I’m done with the whole outline, it’s going to a few “beta” readers, so to speak, to see if there are any glaring plot holes, etc. that need to be fixed before I sit down and start writing in earnest!
To do this outline, I’m not sitting down with Scrivener from the start, as I seem to be able to think better when I’m writing by hand. So, enter piles of notecards! I’m using some A5, A6, and A7-size notecards to do the planning on.
The A5 ones are for the overall outline and the different parts of the books. These are also all white. Then I’m using the others (A6 and A7) for the chapters before switching to some pastel colours for the different point of view characters. (The significance of the pastel colours are that they’re very pretty!)
Once all this is done, I’ll type it out into Scrivener, adding the metadata for the different documents as I go.
This should, in theory, make the writing go smoother and faster...
Well, I already saw what happened when I discovery wrote a “flash fiction” story in the world of Airtha-Eyrassa – I ended up with 50 000 words and a whole new story arc that is now being incorporated into the Ruon Chronicles! I don’t need that kind of a surprise once the first books have already been published, now do I?
I’ll definitely keep you up to date on how the planning goes, as well as the other bits and pieces (including actual short stories) that I’ll be adding to the series as well, like Grove of Graves, which is a short story (maaaaaybe a novella) that is set before the Chronicles properly kicks off.
Until Sunday, when I’ll have some new Where the Stars Used to Sing fiction ready, have a great week – and stay safe!
With love,
Carin
Ps. Now I’ll get back to my notecards as well as some research on Viking longships... but you’ll have to wait until Sunday to see why, mwhahahahahaha!