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maingh0st · 1 month

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A question did you plot your Taryn X ghost fic aka outline it or just wrote it and let the story come to you?

I'm a methodological pantser (thanks ellen brock for helping me realize my writing process is not crazy ✨) so I started with a very loose idea of: (1) where I wanted the characters to start, (2) where I wanted them to end, and (3) big developments that needed to happen along the way. all the little details came together in the process of writing, revising, re-outlining, restructuring, then rewriting. that might sound wild haha but it's just how my brain works—so yes I had a plan, but my outline was very bare bones to begin with & became more fleshed out as I wrote!

#i have to have a general plan or else i flounder #but my plan can't be too rigid or else i feel stifled and lose momentum #my early plotting process is a lot of bullet points of things i want to incorporate (often for thematic purposes - sometimes just for fun)#with only the loosest idea of where those bullet points will slot into the overall timeline #in addition to ellen brock #maggie stiefvater's writing course was a huge help to me #she encourages writers to hold their stories in their heads for as long as possible #bc as long as it's in your head it's limitless #but once you start jotting things down you put fences around it #which is necessary of course. but you don't want to start doing that too early #so a lot of the details just live in my head for a long time and then naturally find their place in the story as i'm drafting #i hope this makes sense #i feel like a lot of writers have much more straight-forward writing processes than me #and it took me a long time (and a lot of trial and error) to learn that there's nothing wrong with that lol #which is part of why i love fanfic - it gives writers a venue to test things out & learn their own writing processes #in a more low-stakes environment #anyways fun fact for you if you made it this far into my tags:#when i first jotted down a loose outline mniwyd was supposed to be five chapters #ask tag #anon #mniwyd

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