January 27, 2004
Finally, progress!
The problem, I discovered, was that I was approaching the outline from the wrong angle. My original outline for the first draft of Exile wasn't much more than a series of questions arranged in the order I needed to answer them. Finally, this morning, instead of just trying to summarize each scene, I did a brief summary, then started asking questions again. I flew. I've managed to outline the first five chapters today, with pointers for where scenes need to be cut, added, and changed, and where information needs to be inserted. I'm getting somewhere!
It feels like the first draft was all about answering 'who' and 'what'. Who are these people? What happened? What if? What next? This draft is looking like it's all about answering 'why' and 'how'. Why did that happen? Why did she do that? How does the world work? I've got 1300 words of outline that asks some of those questions, and even answers a few here and there.
My goal right now is to finish this outline by Friday, allowing, of course, for additional bits of outline to show up whenever and wherever they're needed once I start writing the second draft.
