I'm really gonna do it this time. I'm writing a novel. Sick of starting and stopping and starting and stopping, I finally bowed to my natural instincts and created an outline. Here's how I did it:
•CHARACTERS: Come up with 30 Characters (2 Main, 4 Secondary, 8 Tertiary and 16 Comic Relief/Minor Characters; see above)
•OUTLINE: 42 Chapters with 4 short statement sentences + a cliffhanger note (so when I get to writing, I'll flush out each statement to ~250 words and each cliffhanger at the end of each chapter to ~100 words––"(fb)" = flashback; see above). The sentences got longer as I went on because, naturally, I began to see the intricacies of the plot explode in my mind. It was a true creative burst yesterday. Big props to that large coffee at Dunkin.•SETTING & NOTES/THEMES: As I did this yesterday, I kept a section at the bottom of the google doc for general notes & themes (here I wrote things like, "Yakub wants fame, thinks he is the messiah and can push message through movies and song, doesn’t think he needs the drug"). At first, I did not think I wanted or needed to have a concrete setting, and was inclined to go with 'nameless anyplace, USA' as the locale. But as pushed on, the place became real to me and I knew it had to exist in the real world. The name of the novel is Pure Freedom, which is a play on the last two Jonathan Franzen books (Freedom and Purity). This is a shout-out to the fact that my art is stupid and bad, and also to the fact that I don't read at all, let alone Franzen. So then I thought, why don't I take it a step further in this (stupid) direction. I googled to see if there was a town in America named Franzen and there is! Franzen, WI. Perfecto.
Today I'm gonna finalize the outline and then it's WRITING TIME. I know I can do at least a chapter (1,000-1,500 words) a day, maybe two, so I should be done with this thing in a couple months (factoring in rewrites and editing). Previously, the biggest issue I've faced trying to 'write a novel' is the whole constantly getting lost if I miss two days of writing and, subsquently, finding myself in a hell of confusion, editing and hating what I've already wrote because I can't think of what should happen next. I've always been anti-outline because I didn't think it was in keeping with my hotshot flyboy style. But damn did that feel good yesterday. I'm gonna be a novel author. It's happening.
UPDATE 2020: Obvs, I abandoned this lol but I "published" it as something I think, I forget !
