NB: Although I’m posting parts of the GWWA story over the course of the next few weeks, those posts are prescheduled. This post was written after the GWWA posts that are set to go live in July.

I’ve written in the past about my thoughts on outlining a novel. Usually when I am writing a story that I think is going to become a book, after about 15,000 words I’ll go back and do an outline of some sort. However, for the GWWA story, I didn’t do that. It started as a short story, but I realized after about 8000 words that I would need it to be novel-length to really explore the ideas I wanted to explore. (A similar thing happened with my urban fantasy novel; I was planning to just write a short story but after about 10,000 words I realized it needed to be a book.) However, unlike my other novels — Lessons or Training the Trainer, for example — I didn’t go back and do an outline. It wasn’t until I was about 20,000 words in that I even figured out how I wanted the book to end, and it took until about 30,000 to really frame up that idea in my head and decide how I wanted to get there. By that point, I already knew the major story beats.

The other thing about this story is that I’m writing it primarily at work. When I write at home, I’ll open two windows on my screen — one to write in, and one for the outline. Then, as I go through the items in the outline, I’ll highlight them — usually in purple — to indicate that I’ve written them in the actual story. For the GWWA story, though, I’m doing 95 percent of the writing on my phone, and I don’t have a foldable phone with a big screen. If I did, maybe I’d have done an outline, but I’m not a foldable phone guy. So instead I just keep the outline in my head.

It’s kind of like trying to build a building without a blueprint — I know what I want it to look like, and I have the ability to hire the right people to make it happen, but without blueprints people are working strictly based on their knowledge, experience, and expertise. I’m depending upon those three things — my knowledge of the BDSM and professional wrestling worlds, my experience writing stories, and my expertise in the writing process — to make sure this story — this building, as it were — can stand on its own. I think I’m doing okay, but I probably would feel more comfortable if I had an outline. It would help me keep track of my milestones (ooh, idea for later: writing and agile methodologies) and would give me the ability to see my progress toward the end in a tangible way. At this point, I’m just doing my best to figure out where I am and how far I have to go, and hoping that I get there.

I’m sure I will — I have the end in mind, although I didn’t begin with it there. Still, it’s better than just writing and writing and writing, and hoping some plot shows up somewhere.

In some ways I hope that I don’t get too comfortable about this — I don’t want to write without outlines, in general. But sometimes it works out. Sometimes.