A living story
Filed under Writing Journal on September 8, 2004
Tagged: Maiden of Pain
I started chapter 10 last night. As I was conferring with my outline, I noticed that the point in the story where I was writing should have been chapter 9. A new chapter had been born as I was going along, and I hadn’t even realized it. Looking back, I can see where I created the break. By adding a significant turn of events, I made chapter 8 into two chapters, and moved the content of chapter 9 into chapter 10.
This got me thinking about one of the questions I was asked in the recent Silven Trumpeter interview. They wanted to know if any of the characters had taken on a life of their own and either changed the story or their role in it. I haven’t really found this to be the case, and I think it’s because of my outline.
A solid outline will prevent a lot of the “organic growth” that results in a character “taking over” a story. When I started writing the first novel in my Chronicles of Arunda series, I didn’t have a detailed outline, and the story and characters kept shifting. My wife complained that I wasn’t making any progress because I kept going back and changing what I had written in the first couple chapters. The changes that have happened in Maiden were conscious decisions on my part, meant to add to the story by changing a dynamic between characters or just providing more content, but the plot structure and sequence has remained relatively untouched since Phil approved the outline back in December.
