Status Report From the Scrivening Annex

Jen and Kent have nearly filled that steno pad, and generated enough colored-paper squares to all but obscure the dining table (and that’s with the board in!). In other words, the preliminary outlining for Sibling of Music Novel is almost complete.

We’ve made a lot of fun discoveries on the way to this point, things we might not have learned about our characters otherwise. Maybe they would have told us this stuff in the thick of the prosening, but we’re pretty sure most of it wouldn’t have come up. It’s oblique to the plot. A lot of it will never wind up on the page, but it defines the space for the things that will be on the page.

This is a story that we’ve known — in elevator-pitch form — for quite a while. Feeling it solidify through the outlining process has been wonderful. The thing that we found ourselves stuck on the longest is one particular week in the timeline. It falls late in the story and involves a unique mix of characters. That combination makes for a lot of corners to try and peer around to see what’s happening up there. Kent was tempted to just leave it vague for now and get started writing, to fly through it by the seat of his pants when he gets there. But Jen calmed him down with some orange slices and we stuck to our process.

A major benefit of all this pre-work, for us, is that we can get stuck sooner. On our first few projects, when we used more of a pantsing approach, we’d routinely get stuck for a period of months. Months. Finding out where the sticky spots are while we’re just sketching is a lot more efficient than running into them in the midst of an actual first draft.

We’re not trying to be the Outline Police or anything, but it’s been a tremendous boon to us.