blog

This after­noon I had a few spare min­utes and so I stopped in the peri­od­i­cals sec­tion of the library to skim through some issues of Lead­ing Edge, the BYU sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy mag­a­zine. (I’m going to start sub­mit­ting sto­ries to them.)

In issue #52, from Octo­ber 2006, I came across a short arti­cle by Bran­don Sander­son enti­tled “Outlining.” And I read it. (Duh. :)) And you know what, it was exactly what I needed at this point in my fiction-​writing devel­op­ment. In all of the fic­tion I’ve writ­ten in the past few years, I’ve gone the organic route, with very little plan­ning. All I do is let the writ­ing accrete bit by bit and see what shapes I get in the end.

But it isn’t work­ing as well as I’d like. I feel like my fic­tion is lack­ing over­all struc­ture, like I’m just wing­ing it. And in read­ing Sanderson’s arti­cle, I real­ized that out­lin­ing is the answer. Fig­ur­ing out the story in advance — par­tic­u­larly the ending, which is some­thing I’m not very good at — will help tremen­dously with craft­ing some­thing really good. I’m excited.

Of course I’ll allow small tan­gents here and there, and some­times even large ones, since I’m all about the serendip­ity that my sub­con­scious bub­bles up to me while I’m writ­ing. But I do need more struc­ture — espe­cially with any­thing longer than a couple pages. :)