My Outline Isn't Enough!

I'm having the opposite problem - my real plot hasn't even started yet, and at this rate I won't finish the actual story by the end of November, let alone 50k.

Can you make things a bit more detailed? Add in slice-of-life scenes around the important action?

Having been called in here very many times over the past few months to answer for this or that misdemeanor, Oliver was well acquainted with the room's nuances and eccentricities – most of them fungal.

Hey, I am right there in the same problem. I'm already half way done with my story and it's is only a little over 7,000 words! My plot is running out so I asked the person that I knew wouldn't try to down it and ruin my idea. They had a pretty good idea to keep the plot going. Figure out some twists and add them to the story. For instance, have the protagonist turn into an antagonist or something like that. You're not alone. I am just adding more and more twists to my story to keep it going. Good luck!

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That happened to me last year. When I realized I was going to hit the ending too soon, I had my character wander off into random filler for a while. I know it's not as great as advancing the plot, but it was the best I could do. You might try making up some new mini story arch and tossing it in.

This year I don't have that problem because I don't have an outline. I made an outline, but I ended up trashing that story halfway through the first day. I haven't got a clue where this stuff I just made up is going. It doesn't even have a plot. Oh well. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon.

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I'm not a professional writer, but I am fairly well experienced writing professional theses. One thing that never really worked for me is having a proper outline. I always felt that outlines restricted my train of thought and almost held me back from creatively exploring other ideas. I do, however, tend to keep a "tasklist" of things that I do want to talk about.

When I usually write for NaNoWriMo, I'm just writing and ensuring I cross off things that I want to write about.

This will be my first time attempting to write a novel. I would love to read your words of encouragement!

I'm afraid this will happen to me down the road. That said, I don't think I would be doing nearly as well without an outline. At first, my outline had 25 chapters. Easy enough, I thought, to do 2K a day, a chapter a day and get 50K. Whoopee.

Except it wasn't that easy. I found myself stalling for time, trying to come up with things to happen to string things out in some of the chapters. So now I have essentially 22 sections. I do the math every day to get a rough estimate of how long a given chapter has to be, but if I don't make it, I don't sweat it too much.

Hopefully some of the more intense, crucial chapters will pick up my word slack. Hopefully.

Tomorrow's mission: Chapter 4!

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Her Brother's Keeper
Number of deaths: 4
Number of chapters completed: 23/23

Outline you mean where supost to use outlines, :S
my online constist of a pharagraph i scratched out with a pencil on the 31, my suggestion is keep with it if your doing a indepth outline it will slow you down at first but when you really get typing it will speed you up. or that's my though anyway

My word, same thing is happening to me. There is no way this stupid story has enough meat in it to be 50,000 words. I could probably wrap it up around 35k. This would entirely suck, so I'm thinking tons of padding and florid description is in order. Oh, and plenty of asinine dialogue.

If I were you: first, I think I'd just finish the story. Then I'd know where to add things. (At least, that's my current plan. Although lingering on stupid scenes and making characters bicker is adding a lot of words, too.)

Or you could just start writing PART TWO. I thought about adding a long and corny epilogue as well, a la JK Rowling.

Everyone's kid is so special. Makes you wonder where all the ordinary adults come from.

Kind of having the same problem. I just did some math to see where my current outline would lead me and I'm afraid it will be way short of 50K.

My problem (which is probably the reason I've never attempted to write this many words) is that I feel that it is stupid to just write in words for the sake of a word count, if I'll be editing them out on the next revision (I hope I will come back to edit this first draft later).

So do I need to rewrite my outline? Because I don't know if I can motivate myself to write more words if I know they're just BS I'll cut later.

I have had this problem every year. My usual tactic is just to keep writing until I have written everything in my outline, and not worry about it until I run out of things to write about.

Then I go back and add random stuff in - dream sequences, alternate realities, if it's a traveller they have a tendency to get lost and wander off the path quite a lot.

Either that or I add an epilogue. One year I even had my murderer escape from jail and try and kill more people.

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I have to remind myself all the time to "DWELL". Don't just take character A from point 1 to point 2. DWELL. Show what it's like at point 1, examine why the character needs to go to point 2, put an obstacle in their way to getting to point 2, maybe let them convince you that they need to go to point 3 first, or instead, or maybe they don't want to go to point 2 so you have to show them that points 3 4 and 5 are all dead ends. Whatever it is, don't just list the plot points in narrative format. You have to actually make something happen.

I know it may mean a wee bit of "rewriting", but consider whether you can just start at the beginning, and add two sentences to every paragraph that you've written so far. If you can't, throw in a new character and have that person muck up the works, so that you can. You should definitely be "dwelling" a lot at the beginning. I think that's the problem with outlines. It makes you want to "hurry up and get to the plot", since you know what's supposed to happen next, but then, if you do that, you run out of room at the end.

PS, I'm having a similar problem this year. I have outlined the first several plot points, and I KNOW I have not sufficiently introduced my characters so that my reader (yeah, that's me, actually!) will care about them. So I'm now writing chapters 2.5 and 2.75 to go between chapter 2 and chapter 3. :-)