Inside the writing process: Plotting and Outlining

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all having a great week. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to complete my “roommate” short story this week, because my past weekend was incredibly busy and I want to get a jump on writing for my current main project (still commission 3). I do have a concept that I like though, so hope you enjoy it when I manage to get the story out.

I decided instead to come back to a series of posts that I started over a month ago explaining my writing process. For anyone reading who wants to try writing themselves, I hope talking a little about my process will help shed some light on how to write. For those of you who aren’t interested in writing, I hope it will still be interesting to find out how my ideas makes it to the page.

Last time (a long time ago) I discussed brainstorming and concepting.

After brainstorming and concepting, I outline my stories.

In some ways this is the hardest part of writing a story. Maybe 80 percent of the ideas in a story come out in the outlining process, so it’s a lot of mental work preparing the outline.

I see stories as a series of scenes. I’ve gotten compliments in the past for how my stories work structurally, weaving multiple plotlines together in a way that people find satisfying. I feel like this is mostly a result of my outlining process. For two concrete examples of what I am talking about: in freelancer stories, I weave back and forth between programming scenes with Faria in the past, and the present-day corruption of the hypnosis target. In Cross Contamination, I weave back and forth between the plot lines of the various characters.

So, in the outlining process, I will write a brief summary of each scene in the story, which I look back at frequently while actually drafting.

I get a good deal of kind compliments about character development as well, and I think this is greatly helped by my outlining process. I follow a simple rule when roughing out the outline of a story: each scene must escalate from the last scene, either emotionally, or sexually or both.

Sexual escalation speaks for itself: Scenes should, generally speaking, move from less intense sexually to more intense over the course of the story.

I think my policy on emotional intensity is what people key into when they praise my character development. I know that most people aren’t chiefly concerned with emotional realism when they read smut, but I think it is essential for stories to really feel hot. On a personal level, I think I could read the best-described sex scene in the world, but if I didn’t know why the pair were having sex, or what that sex meant to them, it wouldn’t have a big impact on me.

So how does this apply to my stories? In every scene, something new needs to change or develop internally for the main character. I think neglecting this is a trap that a lot of really great authors fall into, especially when writing longer series. If you are writing a hypnosis story, and have three scenes in a row where the emotional beat is “I was forced to have sex with my hypnotist and it was really demeaning”, it’s going to end up feeling stale even if the specific sexual scenario changes in each scene. So, for example, in each scene in a freelancer story, the main character gives up something about their old personality, or breaks a new personal taboo, or sinks to a new low. Lateral moves kill the feeling of momentum: stories need to intensify as they go on.

So, to sum up, outlining is vital, but it isn’t rocket science: I plan out all the ideas of a story in a scene-by-scene summary, and I make sure that each scene escalates, either sexually, or emotionally, or ideally both.

I hope that some people found this interesting and I’m not just blowing hot air.

Any questions about my writing process or current projects? Ask me anything!