Ah … fully clothed. First I come up with a beginning and the ending. If I can’t conceive of a satisfying, believable ending I don’t write that story. It’s a long journey and I don’t want to fail the reader. Once I get the beginning and ending I then fill in the rest of the book by outlining each scene leading from chapter 1 to the ending.
As adjunct to the outline, I create the critical intelligence sequence (or clue sequence) listing what critical information the protagonist and hero/heroine sequentially generate or have access to and in what scene or chapter that information occurs. In parallel to the plot/story outline, I create a character list summarizing the attributes, motivations, and names of the primary and secondary characters.
Next, I write each chapter trying to avoid getting bogged down editing and re-writing a chapter over and over. I do edit as I go along but steer clear of getting sucked into the tar pit of trying to create the perfect chapter before I’ve written an integrated story of at least 28 chapters in length (370 pages).
Why you ask? Because the integrated story may take me in an unexpected direction beyond my outline. When that happens, and it routinely does, the time spent on polishing the early chapter may turn into wasted effort on material that will be tossed out.
