The Tool that Totally Changed How I Write First Drafts
(and every other draft)
This past month I’ve been participating in Camp NaNoWrimo, working on my new project: a feminist Cinderella retelling. It’s set in the early 90s and it’s been a ton of fun to write.
I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNo many times before, but this spring’s camp was a different experience for me for several reasons. Most obviously, my routine has been totally off due to the corona virus pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the stay-at-home order has affected my writing, just as it has affected nearly every other area of my life.
(Let me just take a moment to give a shout out to my awesome husband for shifting around his own work schedule to take the kids a couple mornings a week so I could get regular writing time even while they’re home 24/7. He is amazing.)
But an even bigger change for me this year was in how I approached my writing.
I’ve always what you might call a plantser. I like to have at least the beginnings of a plan when starting a new project, but I know things will start to evolve once I really get going and I look forward to unearthing those exciting new discoveries. Still, with all my other projects I felt like I struggled when I reached revision stage, wrestling problems that I had a hard time nailing down and fixing.
But earlier this year, one of my insta friends who was training to become a book coach introduced me to the idea of the Inside Outline.
The Inside Outline was developed by author and book coach Jennie Nash. It’s a way of outlining your book that ensures your characters will have agency. In other words, the things that they want and believe will drive what they do, and the things that they do will have both consequences and a direct impact on what happens next. So your outline tells you not only what will happen in each scene, but why it matters.
Armed with a new strategy for outlining, I spent the weeks leading up to Camp NaNoWriMo writing an Inside Outline for my new Cinderella project. This exercise was invaluable. I was able to spot problems with my story idea before I had written a single word of my first draft, and I had a much clearer idea of who my characters are and what makes them tick. And I had a very clear roadmap for how to get the story written, but not such strict directions that I wouldn’t have the freedom to take a detour here and there.
Fast forward to today. Camp NaNoWriMo is over, and I hold in my hands (or rather, am looking at on my computer screen) a much stronger story than could have written without taking the time to walk through an Inside Outline first. Already it is very clear revisions to this story aren’t going to be nearly the slog that they have been with every other story I’ve written before, and they will be much more focused.
Another (somewhat unexpected) side benefit: this first draft is very short. In fact, I expect it to probably double in size by the time I’m done with it. Why? Because I only wrote the most important parts of the story. There are a lot of details to be filled in, descriptions that need to be expanded upon, and side plots that need to be fleshed out. But rather than ending up with a first draft that’s 25K words too long and full of problems, I have a pretty solid skeleton that I get to dress up with all the fun stuff I skipped the first time around because I stuck to my Inside Outline. (It should be noted that I don’t know if this is fluke, or if this is a common outcome when using this outlining tool. But I have never been short-winded in a first draft before, so it was remarkable to me.)
Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s great, Laura. But I’m starting a new book. I need to fix the story I’m already working on.” Well, guess what? The great thing about the Inside Outline is that you can use it to revise, too. My last project - the one I gave to that book coach friend - is currently sitting on the bench waiting on beta reader feedback. But as soon as I’ve heard back from my betas, I plan to really sink my teeth into reworking that beast with my new favorite writing tool!
I want to say one last thing: I do not work for Author Accelerator. I just really love this tool and want to share it with you so that hopefully it will help you as much as it helped me!
If you want to learn more about the Inside Outline, check out this article about it on the Author Accelerator site here. You can read all of Jennie Nash’s Top Ten Tips for Writing here.
A Brief Postscript:
I understand that if the hardest thing I have to deal with during this pandemic is a little disruption to my regularly scheduled programming, then I am extremely privileged. Thank you to all the medical staff and essential workers for putting yourselves on the front line, whether by choice or by necessity. I will gladly accept the disruption in my life to stay home and protect and honor what you do.