I haven't talked about this much on GAF, but I'm a writer, and I recently stumbled on something very useful in my own work. Since I've been lurking in this thread for a while without really contributing anything, I thought I might share it here....
[BTW, this is going to get a little long, so if you just want the meat, skip to the end section...]
I've always been totally unable to use outlines in my writing process. The lengthy job of developing the outline saps my enthusiasm, and I hate knowing the scene by scene details of a story before I dive in. Also, my outlines don't work at all in a practical sense when the rubber hits the road and the characters come to life. Within a couple of chapters, I'm so far off the outline that I would've been better off not to waste my time making it.
But I also have problems with discovery writing. My imagination is really crazy, and I don't have much discipline, so every neato idea that pops up while I'm writing gets incorporated somehow. By the time I finish the first draft of anything longer than 10,000 words, my story is incredibly incoherent. Characters change professions mid-draft. Characters appear, disappear, then reappear. My magic system changes three or four times. My main villain is a male, a female, a non-human, then back to a male again. Then I decide I want
all the villains, so I keep them and turn them into a whole team of bad guys. There are usually dozens of unresolved plot threads, and long sections where the story goes off in totally unworkable directions until I hit a wall and have to invent some unlikely coincidence to get things back on track.
I don't generally fix as I go during that stage because I thrive on momentum and easily get bogged down in editing, so I just put notes to myself about the things I'm changing, and keep on writing. Consequently, reading my first draft--I think of it as a
zero draft for obvious reasons--is like immersing yourself in the fever dream of a highly deranged lunatic.
Writing this way is fun, and the
process of creating such an unrestrained draft is useful in many ways, but the result is such a mess that it makes the second draft really hard, and
very slow to write. For example, I have one WIP where I was able to write a 130,000 word first draft in a couple of months, but I've been laboring on the second draft for more than a year with no end in sight.
As someone mentioned above, indie authors selling on Amazon need to generate a lot of material in a hurry for the best results, and my current speed of production just hasn't been cutting it
Now I think I've finally found a solution. It's working for me very well so far.
******The Solution******
Several years ago when Nanowrimo was first becoming a thing, a very prolific speculative fiction writer named Lazette Gifford came up with a method she called the Phase Outline. She posted an article about it that you can read
right here.
This approach is not really like writing an outline at all because you have to get so deep into the weeds. There's no abstraction, no distance. It's actually more of an abbreviated draft than an outline. Every little kernel of every scene is worked out in advance, and you write the outline in the same way that you draft a scene. You have to immerse yourself in the moment by moment sequence of events, let it play out mentally in great detail, and describe it from beginning to end as it happens. The only real difference from writing a full length draft is that you don't bother with punctuation or formatting, and you greatly compress your language.
This results in something that's very long for an outline, but very short for the draft of a novel. I'm getting about three words of actual narrative for every word in my phase outline (I'm actually calling it my
pocket draft). In her article, Lazette Gifford says she gets about 7 words, so I may be using a little more detail than she does. If any of you decide to try this, your mileage may vary.
Making tweaks and adjustments to this pocket-sized draft--even when you have to make changes that alter the whole shape of your story--is very easy, almost as easy as tweaking an outline, but the process of writing it absolutely mimics the experience of "pantsing" a full novel. There is the exact same sense of moment by moment discovery, and you are able to work on all the elements of fiction: the texture, the atmosphere, the character quirks, the flow, even the language... All those things are represented, but highly compressed.
Later, when you get ready to turn it into a full length draft, the whole thing practically writes itself. It's totally effortless, almost exactly like doing a quick polish on a draft you've already written. And it's very fast. Lazette Gifford says she gets up to 10,000 words a day working from her phase draft. I'm not that fast, but I'm getting more than 1000 decent words an hour, and the resulting work is good enough to share with somebody and get real feedback on my story, which wasn't true for my first drafts in the past. I'm getting second draft quality (for me) in a fraction of the time.
And best of all, it hasn't stifled my imagination in the slightest. I'm still making the same kinds of crazy decisions I always made on my first drafts, but all that is happening in the pocket draft, where it's easy to try things out and make adjustments.
I heard about this approach to planning years ago, but I ignored it because the idea of doing such a detailed "outline" was instantly unappealing. I just didn't understand back then that this really isn't like writing an outline at all. It's a very good middle ground between outlining and pantsing, with some of the benefits of both.
I would recommend anybody in a similar situation to give it a try. Use it with a short story first and see what you think of the process.
Anyone from Canada have experience publishing via Nook Press? I'm trying to setup a Vendor Account, but it won't let me due to living in Canada. Am I just not able to sell on Nook?
Also, perspective on KDP? Is it worth skipping over other platforms for the benefits offered by Amazon?
I'm not Canadian, so I can't speak to your first question, but on your second: I think KDP is generally worth it for indie writers, mainly because of Kindle Unlimited, which has been really decent so far. I don't have enough published work to give a definitive opinion, but it's not hard at all to get people to read 10% of a book. Readers have a very low resistance to giving something a cursory examination--even from a writer they've never heard of--when they don't have to pay any upfront money beyond their subscription fee.
Long term, I'm not sure how it will work out. Some writers with big names seem to dislike KU because they want more money per copy, but I feel like the volume can make up for it, and I feel like subscription models will soon take over all forms of media distribution.
There should be a mini-NaNoWriMo where everybody writes and publishes a 20k erotica at the same time for the same price, then races them like horses to see who makes bank. Sirap can judge, Cosmic will host, and we'll all be rich and swimming in awkward sex scenes.
I actually tried the erotica thing recently. I took a couple of my short stories that had the potential for sex but didn't have any actual sex, and I tweaked them pretty drastically, then put them up under a new pen name. They sold and are still selling, but the decline was pretty steep over time, and I discovered I can't write that kind of stuff fast enough to keep up with the rate of decline. I think you would need to produce at least a couple of stories a week to get any kind of momentum going.
And there really seems to be a huge benefit to having a big catalog. People read one book, then they read the other. I gave one of my stories away for free for a couple of days, and the other started selling fast again for about a week. I imagine the same thing would happen every time you released a new book, and as your catalog grows the whole thing probably gets magnified.
Got the final shaded version of the comic in and it came out great. Can't wait to see this puppy released, and even more excited that they're adding it into the print version.
