Novel90 Challenge | Days 10 - 16

I decided to do the Novel90 Challenge. Here's how it's going.

This week I really dug into figuring out my outline. The only problem? Outlining isn't really my thing. In addition to this being the first book where I don't have the entire main plot in my head.

So, after I transferred my roughs to a fresh document last week, I took a look at the other things I had for this book.

Tucked away on my bookshelf is a comp book with outline work for several of my novels that I did a few years age or so. This outline work is, according to a note on the first page, from an outlining workbook by David Farland that I have on my writing reference shelf. This one revolves around the conflicts within the story, such as the main conflict and the conflicts for each of the main characters. Eventually it leads to each character having a plot line and then you put all of those plots on a single chart (if you've ever seen one of my videos you'll notice a plot chart in the background. This is the method used to create it for book 2.). Then it calls for a sequential outline, the flow of emotions (which I don't believe I ever explicitly did) and adding in "non-plot details."

All that to say that I took the information I had previously tracked for book 3 and redid it with updated information.

HOWEVER, this still hasn't quite filled in my outline, especially since there are a couple conflict lines I still need to figure out. So, I turned my attention to a book mentioned off-hand in a Novel90 Plantser check-in.

This book is called 7 Figure Fiction by T. Taylor.

Now, this author focuses on romance, which is pretty far from my chosen genre both in writing and reading, but the principles and concepts can also be applied to other genres as well. To sum up, every successful book or marketing plan is such because they utilize what she calls Universal Fantasies. In short, things lots of people daydream about, like being pulled into a different world or the hot rich guy having a crush on you.

While I did do a quick test-run of an ad campaign after adjusting my book description for book one, I continued on in the book to discover she also had an outlining technique to try.

So I did. Starting with a single sentence, outline, or more accurately describe, your story. Then she moved on to a single sentence for each part of your chosen story structure. In the past, I have used the 7 point story structure (which can also fit nicely into the 3-act structure), so I went through I chose parts of my story for each point in that structure and described them with a single sentence each.

All was going fairly well at this point.

Until I started the next part.

The next part calls for you to do the one sentence thing for EACH CHAPTER of your story. Now, the reason this is a bit of a problem for me is that, so far, I generally don't know how many chapters I'll have nor exactly what is going in them until I've completed at least the first draft and first round of rewrites. In an attempt to continue following this method, I looked up the average chapter count for a YA fantasy, then checked the other two for their chapter counts, and decided I'm going to aim for 35 chapters at a total of about 90,000 words or so.

Then it led to a whole mess where I divided the chapters by sections in the 7 point plot structure and tried to divide things properly, but then shifted to the rough outline I have in Twine, where I tried to move things around within my plot structure.

Then I decided to try out Obsidian.

Let's just say that's not going well.

To wrap up this mad outlining craziness, let's just say I'm a bit more organized now. And came to the realization that the majority of the scenes I already have figured out belong in the second half of my book.

Now I just have to figure out how to get there.