I’ve been a proud pantser for a while. No outlines for me. I just write and the story comes out. Sometimes. I do a fair amount of rewriting along the way as things unfold and the plot becomes clearer. It’s a bit scary to write without knowing exactly where I’m going, but it’s worked for me. Every time I’ve tried to write an outline, I’ve failed to follow it. It’s just too constrictive.
Until now, that is.
I think it’s safe to say that Thief of Destiny is a bit more complex than Thief of Hope. The scale is much bigger, the stakes are higher, there are two points of view instead of just one. A big theme is that nothing is black and white and the lines between good and evil are murky. I recently came to a point in the book where I realized I had to come up with a plan for moving forward. There’s a war going on and I couldn’t simply pull a battle strategy out of my head without some planning. I’ve gone through much mulling it over, gnashing of teeth, many emails back and forth with my wonderful critique group for ideas, research, and I think I finally have a plan. I’ve even started working on *gasp* an outline. This time I need an outline if I’m going to sync up certain events in the book. I think it’s going to work.
I still don’t know everything that’s going to happen. I can’t write that detailed of an outline. Am I a reformed pantser? Maybe not quite yet. I’ll let you know how it goes when I get to the end of the book.
Cindy Young-Turner 