So, I sat down today with the intention of writing a very different blog post, but that wasn’t working for me, and I decided to instead share with you what I’m working on for one of my projects, “Fighting For You”.
First, a bit of backstory on the project. “Fighting For You” originated as a short story that I wrote years ago, back when I was writing a short story every week (you’ll probably hear more about that in the future). However, I fell in love with the characters in the short story, and decided that it needed to be a full length project, and that’s where we are now.
Getting to this point has not been all sunshine and roses, though. I plotted out an entire outline for the novel, started writing the first chapter…and then promptly shelved it, since I didn’t like the outline, and at the time, I was heavily focusing on The Cora Anthology. And so, “Fighting For You” sat as a draft of an outline on my computer for over a year.
Flash forward to earlier this year, when I started writing again after some stays in the hospital. I had a bunch of time on my hands to be writing a lot, and I felt the desire to return to some old projects, one of which was “Fighting For You”. I’m not really sure what drew me back to it, but after rereading my notes on it, I saw the potential this novel had.
So, where does that put us now? The first thing I did was write out the things I could remember not working with the original outline. One of those things actually severely altered the novel, specifically the ending, which I now have to replot. I then went through how the characters were plotted, and fixed those to reflect the list of changes I had written out. Lena, the female main character who is also a boxer, had the most changes to her character.
Once the characters were fixed, I replotted a bunch of the subplots, and for some reason, I decided that I needed to write them out by hand. I still don’t know why I did this, but the “Fighting For You” notebook is slowly filling up, which is cool to see. And then, because I strongly disliked the original outline, I went through it scene by scene and wrote out the changes I would make to each scene. Once that was done, I wrote out a list of general observations that weren’t already plotted as the new subplots, and am currently in the process of plotting those. Are you lost yet?
The gist of all of this is that there’s a lot of plotting going on. I have gone back through outlines before to adjust them, but I’ve never completely revamped them like I’m doing now. And this isn’t even the only outlining I’m redoing right now, but this is the one that’s taking up most of my writing time.
What have I learned from this experience? One thing I’m definitely noticing is that if the outline is a struggle when it’s being plotted, I’m not going to grow to like it. When I was working on the original “Fighting For You” outline, it felt impossible and wasn’t flowing nicely, and ignoring that is coming back to bite me. So, I guess the moral of this post is pay attention to whether or not your outlines are flowing, because it’s not going to get better if you’re struggling along.
That's all for now, folks!
-C
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