Into the Deep - 4

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This one is running a little late, sorry about that everyone. The month of February is short but the list of things I needed to do during it was long. For our little behind the scenes peak at making Into the Deep, this month I'm going to talk about my outlining process.

I outline pretty heavily and thoroughly for all my projects. Even books I intend to write without an outline get about a scene or two in, and my brain can't help but start breaking down the story into bits. I outline using a heavily modified version of a novel writing technique called the Snowflake Method mashed together with something I half remember about how Brian K. Vaughn said he breaks down comic stories. So the method looks like this:

1. I get a shitty, single subject college rule notebook, and I write out the story. This is usually takes up a few pages. No character names, no real descriptions. For Into the Deep, it's mostly stuff like "Wayfinder gets sent to jail and meets criminal." And so on.
2. I take that messy outline and break it into 5 acts. Each act should be able to be summed up in a single line.
3. I take the characters and write up a brief bio, come up with a physical description and, hopefully, a name.
4. I take the 5 acts and break them down into scenes, each scene should be able to be described in no more than 3 lines.
5. I take those scenes and break them down into what should happen on each individual page of the story, each page gets its own line.
6. I write the script, page by page, scene by scene, act by act, until I have a fully story.

For single issues, instead of acts, I break things up into issues.

I'm breaking this all down because, really, I stick pretty close to my outlines once I have them. The scenes included in this section are the only place where I ended up deviating off course from my original outline. Originally, Sai and Kor sneak into the equivalent of a junk yard, then just run away from the police. It ended up being pretty bland, missing the character that most of Into the Deep has. I think the current version works much better!

That's all for this month. See you in later!