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PSA: My old writing teacher said outlines kill creativity, and I finally tested that with a 12 chapter story
Back in 2019 my community college writing teacher, Ms. Delgado, pulled me aside after class and said outlines were a crutch that would make my fiction feel stiff. I believed her for a long time and wrote everything by the seat of my pants. Last April I tried a 12 chapter mystery with zero outline, and by chapter 6 I had three suspects who all did the same thing and a timeline that made no sense. The story died in a folder called drafts3_finalFINAL and I never went back to it. Two months ago I wrote a 2 page outline for a new story and finished the whole thing in 9 days. So now I write prompts with a rough outline first, and the ideas actually show up faster. What's your setup, do you plot it out or just start typing and see where it goes?
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