Spoils of War outline
On Monday, I wrote a 1200-word outline of a space opera novel, working title Spoils of War. Today, based on feedback from my Monday writer’s group, I expanded the outline to 2000 words. It now goes to my Tuesday writer’s group. After that, I hope to write a chapter-by-chapter outline similar to the one I wrote for Heir of the Line at Dave Wolverton’s novel-writing workshop, only not as long. (That outline was 11,000 words and turned into a 150,000-word novel. Based on that ratio, I’d like this outline to be about 7000 words, in order to produce a novel a bit under 100,000 words.)
This is my first attempt at actually outlining a novel before I really start to write it. I had already written 50,000 words of Heir of the Line before Dave forced me to write an outline. The writing went a lot smoother after that. My two real attempts at starting unoutlined novels since then have ground to a halt.
For those of you who were at Odyssey with me, this is the novel based on the idea I got during Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s novel idea exercise, the one that eventually inspired the famous comment from George Scithers: "It shows." (Sorry–Odyssey 2007 in-joke. I might as well just say, "Bok-keerk!")
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