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Topic : Re: Outlining the climax made me lose interest in writing the actual story I am a discovery writer. I wrote more than 50% of my first novel's first draft. I got really confuse about some aspects - selfpublishingguru.com

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Try breaking your outline into chunks, and write small novelettes for them.

At the moment, you "feel like [you] have already completed the task" - you look at the skeleton in place, and think "that looks the right shape". There's nothing wrong with that.

But, if you look at the outline from a different angle, you have actually turned 1 task (write a story) into a dozen or more tasks. As Amadeus says, most Discovery Writers work best with "this is where we start, this is where we are aiming to finish", with minimal "in between". So, turn each of the key points in your outline into both a start line and a target - take each bone or limb of your skeleton in isolation, and flesh it out.

If we take The Hobbit as an example:

As a (fairly densely-packed) bullet-point Outline:

• Bilbo (a hobbit) talks to Gandalf (a Wizard)
• Gandalf invites himself and some friends to dinner with Bilbo
• A dozen dwarves show up and insist on dinner
• The dwarves persuade Bilbo to join them on their journey
• Braving danger, they travel to Rivendell, and meet the Elves
• While in Rivendell, they learn clues for their quest
• Continuing their journey, they are kidnapped by Goblins
• While hiding from Goblins, Bilbo finds a magic ring
• Everyone escapes the Goblins
et cetera

(Depending on how detailed your outline is, the first 4 points might just be listed together as "Dwarves persuade Bilbo to join them on an adventure")

While you can look at that and see a story, you can also turn it into a series of 8 different snippets: The first novelette starts with "Bilbo is talking with a wizard", and then (after several paragraphs, or even chapters) ends with "the wizard makes an appointment for dinner". What they talk about, what history they share, even whether the meeting is cordial or strained - all of that is still waiting to be discovered. The next mini-story starts with "the wizard has made an appointment for dinner", and ends with "everyone arrives for dinner"...

Some of these chunks turn into larger or smaller stories, with twists you may not have seen in your outline (what danger do they brave on the journey to Rivendell? Apparently, trolls), some of the starting positions will move as the previous sections complete, and you will probably have to go back through and tie things together for flow later - very few authors can write one draft and call it finished - but you will, hopefully, no longer be seeing a "finished story".


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