Outlining for NaNoWriMo

I feel like it has taken me some time to find an outlining process that works for me. I seemed to stumble over this for quite some time. Many of the resources I looked at felt like they began with a fully formed idea and simply had me drop the pieces in place. My problem with this was not having a fully formed idea but only rough pieces that didn't seem to fit together, or vague notions of setting, maybe a character.

My small goal for National Novel Writing Month included working on the outline for the first book in the Mancer series. I didn't want to set a 50K goal, not for an outline and because life has a way of getting in the way. I set a small outline goal of 20K. My outline clocked in at 13K. I made my 20K goal when I began to write part one. I didn't realize setting a non-official goal could still produce a win. In the end, any words written are a win.

Having written a book further on in the series, I wanted to start at the beginning to create a base to work from. I set my goal and began writing down what points I had. Repurposing an older story idea, I had a few characters to work with and a notion of the world. I reworked the magic system to fall better in line with the series.

Taking one character at a time, I wrote down what I felt they should do. It was an absolute brain dump with little organization. From each character I built back and forth fleshing out more as I added more characters. I eventually moved every point to index cards working character by character. Taking those cards, I was able to determine an order and fill in blanks. While I have to do this on physical cards on an actual table. I do hope with experience I will eventually be able to do this all electronically to save on the feeling of wasting paper.

This NaNo, I successfully worked out the plot for the first three parts of the mancer series. Whether this will turn into three books or one large book will be determined on the writing which I have begun. I have updated the book section with a little of a teaser write up that I am sure will change as I progress through the book. I have also set up the project on my NaNo page so I can follow my progress (currently at 20K of a possible 100K) and allow their algorithms to determine my pace and target end date. So far that is Christmas eve, but I expect holiday craziness to cause that to shift.