Outlining Your Novel

To outline or not outline?

Yes, that is a question. For some of my writer friends, the idea of writing a novel without an outline is terrifying. Melody G argues that without an outline, one risks the idea of writing an entire manuscript without a plot. She has a valid argument.

And yet, I wrote Ignited, an 88,000 word manuscript without so much of a character sketch. It was fun and freeing. I was nearly forty thousand words in before I decided on a villain. It was until I'd reached seventy thousand words that I discovered how I wanted the manuscript to end. Writing Ignited without an outline was a grand adventure. And I would do it again.

I have a full outline for Submerged (book two in my series) and in fact, I've outlined the subsequent books, even though I'm nowhere near ready to start writing them. In my opinion, it would be impossible to complete the series without an outline,(or extensive notes to keep all my characters straight)

George R.R, Martin once said that there are two type of writers: either the architect or the gardener. The architect meticulously plans their novel before writing it where as the gardener drops the seed of an idea and allows it to grow as it will. (I paraphrased his words but you get the idea)

I'm proud of how Ignited turned out. If I hadn't had the faith in myself to just write Jura's story, it might have turned out differently.

SO if you're reading this and you find that you're a writer who writes with outlines, I challenge you to toss away the blueprint. Try being a gardener, you never know what you might grow.