This is very interesting! Your process is very different from mine -- yours is much more analytical, I think. (I agree in theory with all the things you say -- love the two parallel plots thing, the Chekhov gun, etc, -- but I have the greatest problem actually thinking my own stories that way.)
If you write things, do you make outlines? Generally. I'm now writing id-fic to see if it actually unlocks me and I'm not outlining at all (partially, yes, because if I decide on the whole inane plot at the start I'm going to loose interest in writing it out). Because I'm not actually posting it under my name, I'm not actually editing it very thoroughly or doing much at all with it -- it's kinda liberating, though I wouldn't do it every time. Well, I'll see how this one works out, at least.
Why or why not? Well, if I don't I get lost. Also, actually writing the first draft is the hardest, most difficult, most horrible thing for me. I feel useless all the while, I get depressed, etc. If I have an outline, I know what I have to write, and I can actually tell myself, 'just write out this: Edward, Bingley & Darcy go out shooting, banter ensues, Edward brings them back to Jane', and I just kinda... push through my general mood of uselessness and do it? Like a by-the-numbers exercise for children.
Do you always do it? Well, except in this latest story, yes!
What do they look like? A list of scenes, divided into chapters. A recipe. The more detailed I can do it the better, but I often write vague stuff like 'picnic, banter about books' -- in general I try to add where I wanted to go with it, though (like, 'X realizes Y thing', or something).
How are they organized? My first ones were just a non-numbered list made on hand. My first was actually written in the half hour before writing the first 20000 words of NEG, so it was really just, like, the outlines of the figures if it were a drawing, which I then tried to fill out. Now I use a two-columns table. First column has chapter number, date, and any extra info. Second column has scenes and notes about them.
How extensive are they? Really really basic. One paragraph at the most for a chapter that could be anything from 1.5k to 5k.
What info does your outline give you? What will happen, sometimes why.
What doesn't it give you? how it actually works out. The story usually ends up being quite different from my outline (at least the first), because stuff I thought I could make work in theory doesn't in practice. (Like, say, I wrote, 'Emma interrupts a discussion of the her land's men, and convinces them to stay, gaining their first shaky support as leader in the process' (not an actual quote, but must be pretty close). I never ever ever, despite really trying, could make that scene work. So it's not in the outline anymore. Well, the story is sort of abandoned for now, but apart from that.)
Do you like doing it, or does it feel like a lot of work? Well, it's sort of necessary drudgery. I love love brainstorming stories. It's one of the most fun parts, so deciding what will happen is not exactly the issue. Writing it out once I've decided sort of is, though, though not really that much work.
Link to an outline of one of your stories (oh! A link to the final story would be cool too)?one of NEG's first outlines here & NEG. NEG is actually a story about which I really changed my mind from first outline to last version (last version being the one I'm actually still writing), including very basic things as how I represented gender identity and stuff. I actually wrote it, uhm, from start to finish two different times (second time reused scenes, but not that many), and I'm rewriting from ch. 13 onwards a third time (they do say third time's the charmed).
I sometimes attempt to play with structure, mostly failing horribly. My 2010 yule story and we will live happily ever after was actually planned on a defined structure, though in this case I wrote the outline and filled it out actually on the same document, one thing on top of the other -- I used the movie dialogue as a way to avoid straying from the character's, er, characterisation, since he's one of which we don't get much. I used them as sort of separators for sections, which are supposed to build up to the (known to the viewer, since this is interstitial) end of the story, which isn't actually explicit (well, it is on the summary, but not the story). To attempt to up the tension in each section, I decided to make them each shorter than the last, while also trying to keep them thematically related to the dialogue used, so it required a lot of finagling. I... am not too happy with that story. It didn't quite do what the person who received it wanted, and it wasn't good enough on its own to justify my drawing away from doing what they had asked for, so... :/ (It was interesting to do, still, both in a purely technical sense -- to attempt to use my arbitrarily decided structure and see if it did what I designed it to do -- and in a stretching my limits way (most explicit story I've written to date, even if it's not very explicit).)
no subject
If you write things, do you make outlines? Generally. I'm now writing id-fic to see if it actually unlocks me and I'm not outlining at all (partially, yes, because if I decide on the whole inane plot at the start I'm going to loose interest in writing it out). Because I'm not actually posting it under my name, I'm not actually editing it very thoroughly or doing much at all with it -- it's kinda liberating, though I wouldn't do it every time. Well, I'll see how this one works out, at least.
Why or why not? Well, if I don't I get lost. Also, actually writing the first draft is the hardest, most difficult, most horrible thing for me. I feel useless all the while, I get depressed, etc. If I have an outline, I know what I have to write, and I can actually tell myself, 'just write out this: Edward, Bingley & Darcy go out shooting, banter ensues, Edward brings them back to Jane', and I just kinda... push through my general mood of uselessness and do it? Like a by-the-numbers exercise for children.
Do you always do it? Well, except in this latest story, yes!
What do they look like? A list of scenes, divided into chapters. A recipe. The more detailed I can do it the better, but I often write vague stuff like 'picnic, banter about books' -- in general I try to add where I wanted to go with it, though (like, 'X realizes Y thing', or something).
How are they organized? My first ones were just a non-numbered list made on hand. My first was actually written in the half hour before writing the first 20000 words of NEG, so it was really just, like, the outlines of the figures if it were a drawing, which I then tried to fill out. Now I use a two-columns table. First column has chapter number, date, and any extra info. Second column has scenes and notes about them.
How extensive are they? Really really basic. One paragraph at the most for a chapter that could be anything from 1.5k to 5k.
What info does your outline give you? What will happen, sometimes why.
What doesn't it give you? how it actually works out. The story usually ends up being quite different from my outline (at least the first), because stuff I thought I could make work in theory doesn't in practice. (Like, say, I wrote, 'Emma interrupts a discussion of the her land's men, and convinces them to stay, gaining their first shaky support as leader in the process' (not an actual quote, but must be pretty close). I never ever ever, despite really trying, could make that scene work. So it's not in the outline anymore. Well, the story is sort of abandoned for now, but apart from that.)
Do you like doing it, or does it feel like a lot of work? Well, it's sort of necessary drudgery. I love love brainstorming stories. It's one of the most fun parts, so deciding what will happen is not exactly the issue. Writing it out once I've decided sort of is, though, though not really that much work.
Link to an outline of one of your stories (oh! A link to the final story would be cool too)? one of NEG's first outlines here & NEG. NEG is actually a story about which I really changed my mind from first outline to last version (last version being the one I'm actually still writing), including very basic things as how I represented gender identity and stuff. I actually wrote it, uhm, from start to finish two different times (second time reused scenes, but not that many), and I'm rewriting from ch. 13 onwards a third time (they do say third time's the charmed).
I sometimes attempt to play with structure, mostly failing horribly. My 2010 yule story and we will live happily ever after was actually planned on a defined structure, though in this case I wrote the outline and filled it out actually on the same document, one thing on top of the other -- I used the movie dialogue as a way to avoid straying from the character's, er, characterisation, since he's one of which we don't get much. I used them as sort of separators for sections, which are supposed to build up to the (known to the viewer, since this is interstitial) end of the story, which isn't actually explicit (well, it is on the summary, but not the story). To attempt to up the tension in each section, I decided to make them each shorter than the last, while also trying to keep them thematically related to the dialogue used, so it required a lot of finagling. I... am not too happy with that story. It didn't quite do what the person who received it wanted, and it wasn't good enough on its own to justify my drawing away from doing what they had asked for, so... :/ (It was interesting to do, still, both in a purely technical sense -- to attempt to use my arbitrarily decided structure and see if it did what I designed it to do -- and in a stretching my limits way (most explicit story I've written to date, even if it's not very explicit).)