I had no idea what I was going to talk about today, so I'll just talk about what I've been up to. This week I have been trying to write my synopsis. I've spent the last few months setting up my novel's conflicts, character sketches, plot. So now the challenge is to get all the ideas I fleshed out into a synopsis. And then I want to break down the synopsis into chapters. It sounds a bit circular, but this process has been working for me so far. It isn't as complicated as it sounds, it's just that I have an entire notebook filled with ideas that I have to reduce into a synopsis. But I've gotten the chance to read over my plot ideas, flesh out the characters, and remove things that aren't logical.
The other challenge is to not suck the creativity out of all this. I don't want to do so much pre-writing that it ruins the actual writing. If the creativity is gone, it makes it really difficult to incorporate new ideas into the story. It makes even coming up with new ideas nearly impossible for me. This has happened to me before. I'd pre-written a screenplay to death, and when I got down to writing it, I couldn't come up with anything new that would help the story. I guess all this is a balancing act that I'm still trying to learn.
Do you create outlines before you start writing?
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