Good question.
(Edit: "good question" is short for: I'm glad you brought it up, I haven't really thought about it and it's really just what felt right)
So, the first pass of the outline is very rough, just a few sentences. Once I'd done that for all the stories I went over them and wrote a slightly more detailed version of what each story is about.
Second phase I got into a bit more detail. I used the original descriptions to do a better pitch sentence. I defined the promise of each story, and I added notes about character wants and needs for the protagonist.
After that I split each story up into three parts/acts, defining how each story starts and ends and what happens in between. Once done with that I wrote a description of what's happening in each act - kinda like I did for each story in the previous phase.
This is also where I did a list of tropes included in each story, but I'm not actually done with that yet but have skipped ahead to the next phase.
I'm now on the third phase. In this, I'm setting up waypoints that the story will have to pass in order to achieve what it needs to tell, and then I'm listing the scenes the story needs for getting through the waypoints. I also add notes about important side characters that haven't already been mentioned.
The next pass of this phase is to go over the list of scenes for each story to try and define in more detail what I want each scene to achieve (other than progressing the events of the story - stuff like character development etc).
Once this is done I expect I'll start the actual writing - one scene at a time. Before writing a scene I expect I'll do a brief outline of it so I have an idea of what's happening. If there's any conversation happening in the scene I'll write out the lines the characters say first, and then put the conversation into the scene later.
My thinking is that in this way I'll get a good idea of what the building blocks of my story are, and I hope to figure out what's important to the story. Consequently I hope to find out what bits are unimportant and that I've just kept in because I'm emotionally attached to them in some way.
I've used similar methods in the past, but this is the first time I'm focusing this much on identifying the various elements of the story and what purpose they serve to it. Previously I've mostly just gone over the story repeatedly in more and more detail until I've had a good enough outline to start making prose from.
Does that answer your question?
(Edit: "good question" is short for: I'm glad you brought it up, I haven't really thought about it and it's really just what felt right)
So, the first pass of the outline is very rough, just a few sentences. Once I'd done that for all the stories I went over them and wrote a slightly more detailed version of what each story is about.
Second phase I got into a bit more detail. I used the original descriptions to do a better pitch sentence. I defined the promise of each story, and I added notes about character wants and needs for the protagonist.
After that I split each story up into three parts/acts, defining how each story starts and ends and what happens in between. Once done with that I wrote a description of what's happening in each act - kinda like I did for each story in the previous phase.
This is also where I did a list of tropes included in each story, but I'm not actually done with that yet but have skipped ahead to the next phase.
I'm now on the third phase. In this, I'm setting up waypoints that the story will have to pass in order to achieve what it needs to tell, and then I'm listing the scenes the story needs for getting through the waypoints. I also add notes about important side characters that haven't already been mentioned.
The next pass of this phase is to go over the list of scenes for each story to try and define in more detail what I want each scene to achieve (other than progressing the events of the story - stuff like character development etc).
Once this is done I expect I'll start the actual writing - one scene at a time. Before writing a scene I expect I'll do a brief outline of it so I have an idea of what's happening. If there's any conversation happening in the scene I'll write out the lines the characters say first, and then put the conversation into the scene later.
My thinking is that in this way I'll get a good idea of what the building blocks of my story are, and I hope to figure out what's important to the story. Consequently I hope to find out what bits are unimportant and that I've just kept in because I'm emotionally attached to them in some way.
I've used similar methods in the past, but this is the first time I'm focusing this much on identifying the various elements of the story and what purpose they serve to it. Previously I've mostly just gone over the story repeatedly in more and more detail until I've had a good enough outline to start making prose from.
Does that answer your question?
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