My New Year’s resolution this year was to write a completed first draft of my young adult fantasy work-in-progress. This is the same fantasy project I mentioned in a post back in 2023. I wrote the first two scenes without any idea whatsoever of where I was going with it, even within the current scene I was writing. So, last year, I went backwards and started prewriting. I spent months discovering my characters’ backstories, fears, desires, and goals in life. I then spent a few more months researching and building my low fantasy world, even going so far as to create a (horrendously) hand drawn map. What was most difficult for a pantser like me was figuring out my plotline.
For my other two WIPs, I started with an image for my opening scene and let the stories take off from there. I’ve always hated outlines, even as a student, because I feel like they inhibit my creative freedom to go where my mind—and in the case of fiction, my characters—takes me. I wrote my entire first manuscript, The League, by only knowing in extremely vague terms what needed to happen in the next couple of scenes. I was literally 70% into the book before I figured out how it was going to end. When I had to describe my plan for the ending of my second work-in-progress as part of my bachelor’s degree, I floundered, and once I had that plan written down, I lost interest in it for years.
Which brings me to my current WIP. I know vaguely how it is going to end, but I don’t have a specific path as to how it’s going to get there, which isn’t typically a problem for me. I seem to be struggling with it for this book, though. While I was doing the prewriting, I kept having scene ideas pop into my head. I wrote most of them then and there while they were still so fresh in my mind and vivid. That is something I did while writing The League, as well, jumping from the scene I was working on to a future scene that I could then insert where it needed to go when I got to that point in the story. This was also my plan for my current WIP, but I’m struggling to write the in between scenes that I need to connect them. I think I might need to divert from my typical way of writing and create an extremely vague outline to help me see how the events develop and when their corresponding scenes occur.
I say “extremely vague” because I still want to give myself the creative freedom that is essential to my writing process. I don’t want a rigid outline that describes every aspect of each scene. I’m talking about a list that’s more along the lines of “this is the scene in which this event happens. It should happen at this point in the story.” I can use that to organize those already written scenes in the order they need to go in and where they should be within the plotline. I believe this will give me more structure to help guide me through writing the book, but without stifling my creativity.
So, I’m going to take this week to work on creating that vague outline. Only once I get that done will I go back to drafting, which likely means scrapping the original scenes I had written in 2023 because the characters’ actions no longer fit who they are after I further developed their personalities. Hopefully having this outline will help me rewrite those scenes and the subsequent ones so I can complete the draft by the end of this year.
Wish me luck, and hopefully you will hear from me soon with a progress update!
Allison Burton 