There's not enough bitching

[thepanda]

I got walked out of work by the police tonight.

[Yuthirin]

That's...not good. What happened?

[Anastasia]

Oh geez, that's bad. Got fired? I know that's standard procedure in some places, and at the hospital security at any firing was mandatory.

[Brian]

...dominated by wiki, tvtropes and youtube. Urgh.

I WIN AGAIN, LEWS THERIN.

* Brian coughs.

What the hell do you do when the plot summary for one of your fics is ballooning over 5,000 words....

I'm positive I could take the same summary and strip it down to less than half that word-count.  What's probably going on is that as you plot out the outline, you determine other details that are more than just 'summary' in scope--  But because it's your plan moving forward, you include them anyway.  For what it's worth, I frequently outline large blocks of details/ideas to include in a scene.

On a few occasions, the outlined text resulted in a scene that was not much longer than its summary.  This is probably not a bad thing, and like all writing techniques, it's probably something you'll want to play around with.


From my personal experience, that level of detail is fine for the first two scenes, but as you reference scenes a chapter or two down the line....

The big risk is that one of your characters will surprise you at 10% of your summary, and do something that ruins all of your planning.  Then you have to chose between something that (to you) feels forced to keep the story on track, or discarding much (possibly _all_) of your outline.

My suggestion would be to scale back the level of detail in your committed outline for anything more than two chapters beyond what you've written -- at least until you get closer to writing them.  Don't throw anything away, but further ideas can be written out, or moved to a 'snippets' file (or the like) for later consideration to see where an appropriate scene to apply them might be.

But that's just me. >_>;

I got walked out of work by the police tonight.

Echoing the 'what happened'?

[VySaika]

The big risk is that one of your characters will surprise you at 10% of your summary, and do something that ruins all of your planning.  Then you have to chose between something that (to you) feels forced to keep the story on track, or discarding much (possibly _all_) of your outline.

This happened in Sword and Shadow. Had a nice story outline(about a page), and individual chapter outlines(about a paragraph each) all done up through the end of the story.

Then the characters changed the game on me. -_-

Story's turned out for the better because of it, but was still a bit "well fuck. What now?" at the time.

[Yuthirin]

I WIN AGAIN, LEWS THERIN.

I had a tough time explaining why I was laughing so hard at work at 9 am.

[thepanda]

What happened?

Stupid work policy. I still have my job, by the by, they just forced four of us to take a day suspension (with pay!) because our names were on a piece of paperwork. The details don't really matter.

Thing is, it used to be that something like this would take 10 minutes to process and we'd be back in our work area. Now? They take your badge and police escort you out of the building. Oh, and it stays on your record for 24 months.

[Brian]

Customer complaints suck.  Especially for government jobs. :(

[Yuthirin]

What happened?

Stupid work policy. I still have my job, by the by, they just forced four of us to take a day suspension (with pay!) because our names were on a piece of paperwork. The details don't really matter.

Thing is, it used to be that something like this would take 10 minutes to process and we'd be back in our work area. Now? They take your badge and police escort you out of the building. Oh, and it stays on your record for 24 months.

Welcome to the era of Homeland Insecurity, I guess.

[Anastasia]

What happened?

Stupid work policy. I still have my job, by the by, they just forced four of us to take a day suspension (with pay!) because our names were on a piece of paperwork. The details don't really matter.

Thing is, it used to be that something like this would take 10 minutes to process and we'd be back in our work area. Now? They take your badge and police escort you out of the building. Oh, and it stays on your record for 24 months.

That is a remarkably stupid policy. Glad it wasn't any worse, Panda.

[Arakawa]

Physicists and mathematicians have spent hundreds of years trying to find a general solution to the three-body problem.

And yet it is nowhere near as complex and chaotic as the generalized three-mind problem.

sigh

[Yuthirin]

I've yet to solve either the one-mins OR the one-body problem.

[Sinom Bre]

...dominated by wiki, tvtropes and youtube. Urgh.

I WIN AGAIN, LEWS THERIN.

Jeez, I didn't think anybody was still thinking about WoT anymore. :)

* Sinom Bre echoes Yuth's laughter...

[Anastasia]

Physicists and mathematicians have spent hundreds of years trying to find a general solution to the three-body problem.

And yet it is nowhere near as complex and chaotic as the generalized three-mind problem.

sigh

What are those, anyway? Mathematics aren't my strong suit.

[Arakawa]

The n-body problem in physics is to determine the motion of n ideal point particles which interact via gravity, given their initial positions and velocities. For n=1 and n=2 the solution is basically trivial. When you add a third particle, however, things can start to get seriously funky:



http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Three_body_problem

(image and link chosen for its ability to start out intimidating and get even more intimidating the more you look at it)

The generalized three-mind problem has absolutely nothing to do with physics, mathematics, or science. It is what I regularly fail to solve when I can understand the interactions between my own mind and that of another person's, and I can understand the interactions between my own mind and that of some third person's, but when myself and the two other people interact, I suddenly have no clue what is going on anymore.