Red Mage Needs Food Badly

After the mild success of my first partial original fiction story, The Mystic and the Red Specter (which I don’t think I’ll work on anymore), I think I have a better plan as to how I’m going to write my stories from now on. I’ll probably apply this to any fan fiction stories I write in the future, regardless of length.

1. Outline. Figure out some plot points, and write them in a numeric list format as they come to me. Each bullet point will be no more than two sentences long.
2. Excerpts. For each bullet point, I’ll type up a few lines of dialogue, in script format, so that I know how my characters are supposed to react to the situation. If anything becomes inconsistent or out-of-character, I’ll simply have to rewrite it until it makes sense.
3. Prose. Turn that script dialogue into something more organic, so that it reads like an actual story instead of a stage direction. Probably the toughest part of writing.
4. Separation. If the story is going to be a multiple chapter one, I’ll write the whole thing down first, and then break it into chapters later as necessary. The one thing I realize when I abandoned The Mystic is that a few of the later chapters could easily have been condensed or pared down little by little to make things flow more easily. I’ll try not to make that same mistake again with my next piece.
5. Proofread. Use all of the basics - spell check, grammar check, my own judgment - until everything is workable and ready to publish. But just in case…
6. Beta. I’ll have to search for someone else who can catch any editing mistakes I may have made in my search. At the most, I’ll send a fic out for beta reading for up to 30 days after I’ve finished writing it. If no response is made until then, I’ll just publish the story anyway and see what happens.

This is just the why I think I should do things. Your mileage may vary, obviously.

Tags: original fiction, outline, plot points, prose, writing