I did something very different this year in NaNoWriMo.  I wrote an outline.

Past years, I’ve gone with a connect the dots approach. I’ve had a beginning scene. I’ve had a sense of an ending scene. The rest is just getting from point A to point B.

This year, having been involved in some writing group discussions on the subject, I chose to do some outlining.  I actually had a multi-paragraph layout of an Intro, Four Acts, and a Conclusion, fleshed out in decent detail.  Not where I actually wanted to be with it — the technique I was using had several iterations to go — but enough to have some ideas.

As one of my protagonists, Roger, would know, no war plan survives the first encounter with the enemy.  My outline …

Well, it served as some nice guidelines. I managed to hopscotch over a bunch of stuff to have one of the big moments happen earlier than originally plotted. And rearranged some bits to backfill after that. And added a conflict I hadn’t expected to have. And some other scenes that came to mind.  I’m on my way to my second big disaster, and feeling pretty good about things.

I am glad I did the outlining, and I’m glad I was willing to bend and break it as the Muse pulled me along (nose rings are painful, I’ll tell you). I also am keeping in mind that I will not be done with the novel this year — 50K words is way too little. If lucky, I may be at or past the next big event by next Saturday, and the rest will be for me to pick up next November (assuming, he squirmed uncomfortably, I don’t do any work on it in the interim).

And, nicely enough, I’ll know then where I’m going with it. Because I have an outline.