HOW IMPORTANT IS THE OUTLINE?

I am starting to wonder about making this commitment to write 500 to 800 words every day.  I haven’t done anything like that for a number of years and I forgot what it means and how long it takes to write 500 to 800 words then clean it up enough to put it on my blog.  We are talking 2^nd to 3^rd draft here because I write in out in Word 1^st then copy and paste.   Well, sooner or later I am going to have to do it so I guess there is probably no perfect time to start. 

I have decided that I am going to have to re-write my full outline and plot.  It has just been too long and I need to internalize the story again.  No better way than this.  I am also going to have to do character studies for most of my main characters.  I do still have the genealogy I wrote for the family and I need to coordinated history to the events of the book and the real life characters to my fictional characters.  That is all before I can even write the first sentence.  I have decided that when I get the itch to start on the book before this is all done I will simply write either scenes or short vignettes.  I finally have achieved the maturity to see the reasons for all the prep work before a book is written.

 I also think that if I do this prep work well and thoroughly a couple things will happen.  First , it will make it a lot easier to write the actual story.  Second, there will be less re-write necessary.  Third, writing a full prep will actually make it faster for me to write the story.  

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I have thought many times that it would be easier to write a lot of other genre’s other than historical fiction because you have to become intimately familiar with the history you are writing into.  It would be so easy to create a disaster and lose your credibility simply because you got a fact of history wrong.   It is not just the events you must know though, you must also know the real life characters.  One of the people in this book that I need to get to know a lot better is Emon De Valeria.  I remember hearing about him when I was a kid but now I have to get inside his head and find out what made him tick.  This was a world class statesman in the early 20th Century, who was also an illegitimate child in a strictly Catholic country.  What was the effect of the church on his statesmanship?  In 1966 he made a statement that history would blame him for the death of Michael Collins—he was partially right.  So along side of my story characters I also need to know the historical personalities.  This is a fascinating job for me since I am such a history buff but it is also a job that takes a lot of time.  I am also fascinated with the prospect of bringing fictional and real historical events into alignment.  A good historical fiction writer must seamlessly merge  the fiction into the nonfiction and make the reader believe the fictional character also existed even though they know there was no such person.  This is the “magic” part.  It is as detailed as knowing what the weather was like when someone made a famous speech. 

I am in the process now of setting new goals for writing.  This will be part of my preparation for our trip to New Zealand.  I do not want to take all my books with me so I must have the outlines finished when I get ready to leave.  I plan to do the actual writing of the book in New Zealand because I hope to have Suraya’s assistance editing.  So where do I start to try to get this as comprehensive as possible?  As silly as that may sound, I am going to write an outline for the outline. 

It is going to be a very daunting task to find the time to get all this work done in the next 21 months.  I would probably be wise to set up a schedule of what I need to accomplish each month.  If this is not done I will probably not get finished.  So the first thing I need to do is set up a time schedule.  Next I need to outline the outline.  When these two things are done I will go back and adjust the schedule to make it as realistic as possible.   I think I should probably build a schedule summary and adjustment into this project on an end of month basis.  I am confident that if I do this I will leave the USA with a loaded computer and be ready to do the first draft.

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