So the outline I said I was doing last week ended up not being as helpful as I was hoping. I think the issue is I was still relying on all the ‘well I’m going to write this’ stuff. So this week I worked on actually pulling out the scenes I’ve written that are the most complete. That doesn’t mean they’re great, but they are the closest to what I want in the final story. So now I have an actual starting point instead of just everything still in a jumble of files. It’s bare bones, and it’s ~40k words, which scares me a bit.
I did a lot of writing in October and November, but I knew I wasn’t going to use all of it in the final project. Some of it was background, some of it was playing around with the same scene with a different twist. But to actually pull out what it is that I think I’ll be able to use and have it be that little is just an odd feeling, considering how much I had to actively pull from the last rough draft I was attempting to revise, just to get it down to 100k.
On top of that, I am running into the same problem that I was having in that previous rough draft in that the second half of the story is floundering. Turns out that writing the first half of stories for 20 years gets you really good at writing the first half of stories, and not so good at writing the second half. Go figure.
But now that I know it’s a weakness, I’m going to have to do some super heavy lifting in order to figure out how to write endings. I think part of my problem is that I have such lofty expectations that I feel like if I can’t come up with a world shattering ending (a la the Mistborn trilogy; darn you Brandon Sanderson), then I’m worthless as a writer. I need to not aim for that world shattering ending. Not until I can manage good endings. Otherwise I’m just setting myself up for failure.
Now I have my outline pulled. I think for the rest of this month I am going to focus on fleshing out some character backgrounds and working on a short story that needs a tiny bit of tweaking. Then starting January 1st I will actually jump on this thing and start hammering out the plot (a lot of which will be focused on the second half of the book).
