Month: February 2015

This is a continuation of my series on The Labyrinth, that monstrous impossible maze so many of us writers get stuck in during our inbetween years. In the last few weeks, I talked about planning and outlining and the things that I personally learned while going through those steps with my  first novel (The Deathsniffer’s Assistant, available this summer!)
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It’s the big one!

I can’t say that I had fun writing The Deathsniffer’s Assistant. Not exactly. Now, don’t take that wrong. Parts of it were fun. Parts of it were pure joy. And other parts of it were slow torture that I struggled through and bled over and lost sleep and tears to. Some days, it was effortless. Most days, it was like giving birth.

Now, with my work on Deathsniffer done and the rest up to my wonderful production team over at Curiousity Quills Press, I’m concentrating all my efforts on the sequel. And I’m shocked to find that this time? It’s fun. Writing this book has been something so wondrously close to the simple joy I felt writing about Mary the Mouse that some days I can barely believe that I’ve gotten to this place. I look forward to my writing nights! I’m disappointed when Starbucks closes and I have to leave! I think about my book whenever I’m not working on it, excited to get back!

I am actually out of the labyrinth. I can remember what it felt to be like in those walls, where every word I wrote was a new hot coal I had to step on to get to the next word, and the next, and the next. But a memory is all it is for me now, and it’s because of the things that I learned about this very step. I like to think that all the advice I’m giving is pretty solid stuff, but if you’re only going to take one of my articles to heart, make it this one.

This is a continuation of my series on The Labyrinth, that monstrous impossible maze so many of us writers get stuck in during our inbetween years.  Last week, I talked about phase 1 of any novel, planning. You can read the five things I learned about planning while writing my first novel (The Deathsniffer’s Assistant, available this summer!) in this blog here.

Today I’ll be talking about the second phase of writing a novel, outlining. This is a long one because I think this stage is so important and I have a whole lot to say about it!

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1. If you are in the labyrinth, you need an outline.

Bear with me here. This one takes a long time to bring together. But we’ll get there.

I used to be one of those writers who preferred working without an outline. I’d rather find out what was going to happen as it developed, I said, and I did! All the books I wrote before my labyrinth years were written outline-free. I figured out how Mary the Mouse and her intrepid band of investigators were going to rescue Tommy the Turtle on the fly, and it was exciting and grand. I told people up until my mid-twenties that I preferred working without an outline. I hadn’t actually worked in ten years, but that was how I’d always done things before. Why change?

Well… because I had to. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the manuscript I came out of the labyrinth clutching triumphantly above my head was the first manuscript I’d ever written a full outline for.