Average amount of planning and outlining.

[CupcakeNinja]

I have a question for authors who plan their stories. You finished planning\outlining the story or maybe finished the first round of planning. Let's assume that you won't change anything in the future. How many words\pages worth of material do you get? A combination of all your notes, character lists, worldbuilding, etc. How much info do you end up with? Like, for example, twenty pages with fifteen thousand words? Or five pages and a couple of thousand words? Maybe hundreds of thousands of words of data?

ah yeah, i didnt read the whole original post lol. Lemme see...all my notes? like around 5 pages. Probably around at least 7k words between all of my stories? i double space things, so it can get pretty long even if i try to keep the content itself short. Individually the notes probably don't exceed 2k words per story

It would be longer if i did more worldbuilding stuff, but i keep it mainly to characters and planned events. Well, i say i don't world build but really its just that i make the world but end up never really revealing everything that i had built, so I'm basically the only one who knows about it. Still, i keep the notes on them around for possible future reference.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

ah yeah, i didnt read the whole original post lol. Lemme see...all my notes? like around 5 pages. Probably around at least 7k words between all of my stories? i double space things, so it can get pretty long even if i try to keep the content itself short. Individually the notes probably don't exceed 2k words per story

It would be longer if i did more worldbuilding stuff, but i keep it mainly to characters and planned events. Well, i say i don't world build but really its just that i make the world but end up never really revealing everything that i had built, so I'm basically the only one who knows about it. Still, i keep the notes on them around for possible future reference.

Thank you for answering.

 

[greyblob]

A general notebook with names, characters, and locations. Not sure how much that would be since I neglected it for the most part. Maybe 20 words per entry?

I haven't finished out the planning yet, but it comes around to 10~15%. So, each 8 page chapter has an extra 1 page planning. 100k words would have about 10~15k words for planning.

 

[LunaSoltaer]

NORMALLY, I'd have a world map, or at least a high level region map, a small bible of characters, and a basic plot outline of all the major story beats, then write, edit, publish.

When I'm trying to bust out 50k words in a month? Text document of chickenscratch and overreliance on the SH editor's spellcheck.

 

[scribesaga]

When I make a plan or outline, I know it's not going to go according to plan. Things will change, some scenes will be added, others taken away. New inspirations will take over and thus I'll make minor alterations for that as well. I treat the outline as a roadmap. It's a guide to remind me where the narrative is generally going, but is prone to change.

 

[Snusmumriken]

My final outline before I started to write my first chapter was about 20k words after 3-4 months of research. I would say it alone was enough for half of my story or about 100k words.

It kept growing afterwards as plotline changed about 5 times or so while I would add more tidbits to my worldbuilding and update the characters that received some recent development.

 

[Zirrboy]

I use mindmaps and the likes, so it's hard to tell. Could be about a page of actual text if pasted, but I'd say 4-6 if written out.

 

[Leyligne]

Outlines for me are usually a couple pages long. The story itself tends to bloat whilst being written to whatever size I originally thought I would need. Several epiphanies later mad pruning sets in, followed by restructuring and regrowth back to a size I never could have predicted.