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@hope-mcclellan Lol!! You’re good! I mistype tags all the time 😛 (Oooh I like your forum signature!!)

Hm. Well… I call it “Write down whatever first inspired me to write this (nearly always an interesting scene that I came up with), then build off of it at an insanely slow pace and then ditch the outline and just panst it” XD

Ok so really, I’m not an outlining person. At all. I never can follow my outlines without feeling like I’m in a fence. I discovered that this last NaNo, when I wrote literally two paragraphs using my outlined story, then switched to a completely new (I mean “blank word doc and nothing else” new) story and had 16k at the end of November. And actually, it’s that story that I wrote for NaNo that I need to outline some of. But when I say “outline”, I really mean “write down all my random ideas that need to go in here and then organize them in order on paper so I can see where I’m trying to go”.

So you could think of my way of outlining this way: I’m looking at a map of the city I live in. I know I need to go to Walmart and Krogers for groceries, the library to return a book, and the optometrist’s office to pick up my new contacts. So I mark those on my map with a red pen. Then I see what makes sense to do first. The optometrist seems reasonable, so I can get my updated prescription so I can see. I need to get frozen veggies at Krogers, so that needs to be done last. Walmart is on the way to Krogers, and the library is across the street from Krogers. So then I use a blue pen and write numbers beside each place. I put a 1 by the optometrist, 2 by Walmart, 3 by Krogers, and 4 by the library.

Now, I really don’t care what roads I take to get to these places. I could take the loop around town to both the optometrist and Walmart, then turn onto University Drive to go to Krogers and the library, or I could take Main St. through town to the optometrist and turn onto the loop to go to Walmart, then double back around and take Starr up and turn onto University to go to Krogers and the library. Just so long as I get there, and in the order I want, I’m happy.

Hopefully that wasn’t too confusing?? 😀

I’ve read that book, and I found it helpful to some extent… I should read it again cause it was a little while ago.