Sparkling Story Drafts: How to Outline Your Way Toward Cleaner Rough Drafts, Reduce Your Revision Time, and Get a First-Rate Screenplay or Novel onto the Marketplace?Faster

by H.R. D'Costa

More, more, more. Whether screenwriter or novelist, the more you write, the more money you’re likely to earn. The more market-ready screenplays you have, the more enticing you’ll be to an agent. The more novels you publish, the more you’ll boost your discoverability. But to produce more, you need more time. Because your to-do list is lengthy. Besides writing (and marketing), you’ve got other commitments. Job duties. A family to nurture. Not to mention self-care. To be successful, you can’t run yourself ragged. You must use your writing time efficiently . You need to write quicker, you need to write better—the first time around. How? Try outlining a novel or a script in advance. This will boost your productivity (1) You’ll know where you’re headed when you write. Outlining a novel or a script gives you a roadmap, with markers to write toward. Without a roadmap, you’d start strong…but then peter out because you’re unsure about what should happen next. But with a roadmap (i.e. your outline), you can start strong—and stay strong. (2) It’s easier to identify—and fix—problem spots. To identify problems in a draft, you have to wade through a lot of material (100+ pages in a script; 75,000+ words in a novel). With an outline, you have less material to review. It’ll take you less time to figure out your edits. With a draft, editing can be difficult because you might be too attached to what you’ve written. Due to this attachment, you’ll only make superficial changes that don’t fix anything. But with an outline, there’s little material to become attached to. As a result, when writing a novel or a script, you’ll make the drastic changes that are necessary to improve your story, which brings me to… (3) By outlining a novel or script in advance, you minimize unproductive labor and significantly reduce your revision time. In an outline, your scenes are in their bare-bones phase. Because of this, you don’t have to work so hard to implement fixes. To set up, or foreshadow a payoff, you don’t need to rewrite an entire scene or chapter. Just add a sentence or two, and you’re done. To solve a huge escalation problem, you don’t need to toss half of your screenplay or novel—just a few plot points. That’s all. Essentially, with a draft (based on an outline), you’re looking at more of a polish, rather than a major rewrite. You’re looking at 2 weeks (vs. months) of editing. But to maximize your efficiency when writing a novel or writing a screenplay, you need a systematic way to analyze your outline for problem spots. That’s what this writing guide will teach you.

552 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 2018

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, detailed and full of ideas! HR D'Costa's series on iterative outlining gives me confidence that using her methods will dramatically improve my novels.