I’m a discovery writer. (I think I’ve mentioned that before.) I don’t–normally–outline. It just doesn’t work that well for me. I either immediately ignore the outline and write something that bears only a passing resemblance to what I outlined, or I spend way too much of my writing time updating the outline to what I’m writing now.
However, for much of WAR OF MAGIC, I’ve been using a kind of rolling outline that’s worked fairly well for me.
Not that I still haven’t diverged a bit, but it’s usually been more on the order of changing the order of chapters or splitting what I thought was one chapter into two.
At no point has that outline extended more than six or seven chapters ahead of what I was currently writing. Right now, it’s only four chapters.
This has been such a difficult first draft–for a number of reasons. I think this is helping. Too soon to tell whether it will become a regular part of my writing.
Meredith Mansfield, Author 
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