Fantasy — What I'm Up To-Written in Stone

I’ve never really made an outline for my stories before. All of my short stories are generally organic in nature and all the books I’ve written were created chapter by chapter as I wrote. It was fun and I learned a lot of lessons in writing from it, but I always stepped away from my stories feeling underwhelmed. I loved my writing style and my action scenes were on point, but the actual story itself seemed to lack substance, to me at least.

So, I took some time off from writing actual novels and just explored some literary pathways in short stories. I moved out of my comfort zone to write some mild horror-thrillers and I enjoyed it. After a while of just mulling things over in my head, coming up with lots of cool ideas for both of my novels, I decided it was time to do something with them. The big thing keeping me back from actually re-writing my novels was it seemed like a daunting task. I couldn’t just re-write them and hope for the best. That obstacle on top of being swamped with schoolwork, I just put writing on the back-burner for a while.

Now with this pandemic, I’ve had a bit of a break from school stuff and now I’m mainly just focused on studying for the MCAT (Medical School Admissions Test) and entertaining myself. Video games were great for about two days, then I started to go crazy from not being productive. I was reading an article from one of my current favorite authors and he was talking about his progress with his own new novel. He had referenced how he liked to stay mainly to his original outline while writing his novels. Feeling kind of bored with not much else to do, I figured I’d try creating an outline.

At first, I was a little skeptical. I never really saw the point of making an outline. It seemed like it would take some of the fun away from writing. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. My biggest irritant with writing was it took so long and I wanted to create the entire story ASAP. The thing is, I can do that with my outline. It doesn’t happen overnight, and I’m only about halfway done with finishing the first draft of it after a week, but I’m absolutely loving it. I’m editing big plot points without having to sift through thousands of words to change one big thing and I’m coming up with mini flow charts for each chapter that I never would have thought of if it wasn’t for writing an outline.

Of course I’m leaving room for creative choices along the way, and my outline is more of a guideline that keeps me on track from chapter to chapter, but I’ve got the big overarching themes and plot points figured out. I’m including some of my short stories into my re-write of The Resurrection Man. The stories are The Poltergeist and The Giants’ Graveyard. I’m also including a lot of the things that I’ve already written in the past iteration of it on top of some small scenes I was writing in my free time. I’m really excited about this

Now, a quick scene from my re-write. No spoilers:

“And just like that I was whisked away to another place. This place was desolate. A desert, but was still teeming with a terrible life. Monsters mutated by radiation roamed the land. Massive hoards, teeming with writhing, squirmy things, masticating any and all life into sustenance for the surrounding mutants. But this was not the terrible life I sensed because these things were not alive at all, at least not in the traditional sense. Standing on the side of a building, hidden within a white suit with a mask made to look like a skull, stood the terrible life. He was surveying the land before him, gathering information on it. Beside him stood a woman wrapped in baggy clothes designed to weather the desert. The man shook his head and pointed something out to the woman.

Curious to see what his face looked like, I focused myself underneath the covering of his visor and was shocked to see an older version of the boy from my previous vision. His terrible secret had manifested itself and made him into a warrior capable of atrocious acts. But I knew intrinsically he was a good man. He bore the burden of being a killer so the innocent didn’t have to. He didn’t particularly enjoy his life, but he wouldn’t give Him the satisfaction of ending it.”

~James’s vision