#{ Let me know if you need anything changed!! I tend to overwrite but you don't have to match length unless you want to! }

[hazbinned]

@mothvalentino - Plotted Starter!

It had been a tumultuous two and a half weeks since Valentino had shown up at the Hotel, hoping for acceptance with a tale to tell. Reactions had been mixed, to say the least. Angel had behaved how one might expect— and in his stead, Vaggie and Husk had leapt to the defense— while Niffty had remained her usual, frenzied self.

Charlie Morningstar was practically the only person among them who wanted to give the moth a chance, but even Alastor was quick to pick up on the fact that the princess did not fully believe the story Val had told. Apparently, Valentino had relinquished his Overlord status, freed all his souls, and wanted to leave the Vees. Why? Vox and Velvette were upset with him? It wasn't safe for him out there anymore? He'd had everything, and now he had nothing.

Why do that to himself?

It was early afternoon when Charlie had appointed Alastor to his latest task, which was, to his utmost disappointment... to try and make some kind of 'progress' with the moth. Everyone else was avoiding Val, (except for Niffty), so Charlie had suggested that Alastor make him feel more welcome and embraced (as if!), solely because the two of them were both Overlords with a dark past.

Ex-Overlords, in Val's case. As if that put them on some kind of common ground!

Alastor had just about snuck up on Val, shoe tap-tap-tapping as he craned his neck to see beyond the moth's shoulders and white furred ruff.

"What are you making?" he asked, far less curious in tone than he should have been.

Valentino was the only one who frequented Charlie's craft room, after all. Was it some kind of coping mechanism?

Were Alastor truly interested in the younger man's art, he wouldn't always avoid the place like the plague. Simply put, the room had far too much glitter strewn about, and way too many cutesy decorations on the walls for his liking-- why Charlie hadn't taken his suggestions this time, he would never know.

Who in their right mind would want a mural of cartoonish flowers leering down at them while they drew?

The Radio Demon shuffled the stack of papers he held in his hands, then plopped them down on the table (right beside Val's painting) and took the seat opposite him. Smiling in a polite, rehearsed way, he stretched his fingers and began:

"Charlie says we're to be paired up today. We're to get to know each other. She's prepared me with her idea of a 'friendship quiz'..." His eyes drifted over to the pile. "... Let's get this over with, hmm?"

[taz-writes]

So personally, I overwrite because I get way too deep in my characters' voices and let them monologue. The bulk of Feilan features Sayara as a first-person narrator, and she talks a LOT. She'll go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about literally anything, and she's an interesting enough person that I've had to slice whole pages of just... Sayara explaining magic, or Sayara explaining history, or Sayara explaining the very specific reasons why she still holds a grudge against her first grade teacher. She really only needs one paragraph to tell us what her magic does, but when I get into her headspace and start writing it takes a lot longer. I blame the ADHD (both mine and the character's). Sayara doesn't want to tell you that she shoots lasers, she wants to tell you that she learned to shoot lasers by accidentally burning a hole in Hope's favorite jacket and then Hope chased her through the whole castle and that's how she discovered the secret passageway that she's currently using to get somewhere (which is why she started the tangent in the first place). This works really well sometimes and gives her a lot of personality, but I will get in the zone and write her doing this kind of thought process about EVERYTHING. Most of the time, I don't really need to.

So my narrative accounts for about half the cuts, and the other half of the cuts are just extraneous words. I tend to repeat myself a lot, and I can't resist using way too many adjectives and adverbs. It's not even one of those situations where the words themselves aren't good enough, I'm not compensating for lack of vocabulary, I just talk too much. This kills me when I write Violet because she's very concise and precise with her language, but I am still me and I go on tangents.

As for outlines... I'm weird and I'm outline-phobic. I really, REALLY feel you, the ideas I run into when I write are almost always better than my outlines! I just overwrite SO MUCH and SO BADLY that if I don't give myself bare minimum railroad tracks then I will never finish anything. I also retcon constantly. My endings tend to stay the same, and I rarely delete plot points entirely, but things shift a lot when my characters get involved. The prime example here is what happened to Feilan's book 2... the original draft was much longer, but somehow less stuff happened in it anyways? Sayara and Violet muscled their way into character arcs that I didn't anticipate, and then my attempts to clarify a minor religious worldbuilding point turned into an in-universe mythology shift that changed the entire course of the series. Thanks, Harmonine. You ruined everything but also made it way better.

My ultimate strategy? I just BS and pants my way through rough drafts, I find the plot, and then I make an outline based on the rough draft and rewrite the whole stupid thing. I've done this with all my Feilan stuff so far and it's super effective. I make enough changes when I edit that I'm not even losing time! And when I rewrite it's a lot easier to understand how my arcs work and where the characters were trying to make me go all along.

And as for your last point... honestly I don't think anyone knows what the glue is. I sure don't. That's why I constantly get stuck! I believe that skill as a writer is defined by how well you can pretend you know how to glue the bits together.

Guys I’m all for writing without outlines and stuff; I even was an adamant supporter of doing it beforehand, but please, for the love of all that is holy, outline your novels and longer works.

You can get away with not outlining fanfictions and short stories because short stories are, well, short and fanfictions are updated on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

But don’t make the same mistakes I did and not outline your novel; right now I’m (with tears in my eyes) lobbing off chunks of well-loved yet useless text from my manuscript in order to lower the word count so that hiring a professional editor doesn’t kill my bank account.

Writing without an outline is a big component in overwriting, and even if that writing is good, if you want to get it published it basically needs to be bare-bones.

The manuscript I am writing now looks nothing like the one I started four years ago, and the majority of those four years was actually spent editing and re-writing because I didn’t make an outline for it first.

I was an idiot, and I really hope that me passing on my knowledge to you makes sure that you don’t make the same mistakes.