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My draft went from 4 pages to 12 when I stopped outlining, is that a win or a mess?
For the last 3 weeks I've been writing with zero outline and my short story draft blew up from 4 pages to 12, way more scenes but the middle is pure chaos. My writing group says the extra mess is where the good stuff hides, but part of me misses when a draft at least had a shape. Do you all outline first or just dump it all out and clean up after?
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david_stone18d ago
That middle chaos feeling is so real. My last story started as a simple 5 page thing about a guy moving out of his apartment, then suddenly he had a brother, a dead dog, and a whole flashback about a flooded basement. Nine extra pages of junk that somehow had the best lines buried in it. Cleaning that up took way longer than the original draft ever would have. You lose the shape but you find stuff you never would have planned. Twelve pages of mess beats four pages of clean and boring any day.
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