Credit: maciejkuciara

I’ve learned a hell of a lot from writing and publishing my first book.

Chiefest of all of them: do the hard stuff, the legwork and the preparation first, so you don’t have to do twice the work later.

As my dad says, an ounce of prevention saves a pound of trouble. I don’t know if he ever thought it would apply to writing, but it does.

It took 4 years and a hell of a lot of re-writing for Hood.  Rewriting the final version only took 4 months. I’m hoping I can write BOOK 2 in a year.

Part of that is doing what many authors hate to do: Outline. Storyboard. Character pages. Most writers have much of the story already imagined, lodged up there in their head somewhere. They just want to write it as imagined, without being “hemmed in.” But there’s two problems with that:

1. You slow your writing down by about 5x by not outlining first. This doesn’t mean you have to follow your outline exactly. Hell, you can replace things with other ideas or change it on the fly. But writing each chapter is SOOO much easier when you already have conceptualized what is happening. All the stress of “pouring it out” floats away. You’re free. (I always thought outlines were restricting. Reality is, they give you such freedom.)

2. If you structure your story, your scene-sequel pairs from 10,000 ft. view, the quality of your story is exponentially greater. The reality of why we don’t want to outline is because we’re lazy. We want to just let the words fly. We don’t want to “suck the fun out” of writing by following a construct. Be honest with yourself. Yes, it’s hard to plan out the whole damn thing first, but that’s what great stories are made of.

So, here I am, trying to get my outline on. Trying to capture the spirit and mood and excitement of the story in my head in structure. It’s not impossible. Hell, it’s not even that hard. You just have to get your ass into gear and do it.

-Evan Pickering