My second draft outline turned out to be a much bigger task than I originally anticipated. The final product will be several pages long. Each chapter has multiple scenes and each scene must be described with a few choice statements.
So far, I have found one scene that must be rewritten. It is a scene that I already knew would have to be rewritten. It's a scene that has the four grandchildren in it and that just won't work since I changed history and they died a year before the scene takes place. It also has the main character too deeply involved in business.
There are a few things I like about the approach I have chosen this time. The primary thing is that it wastes a lot of time. While I'm wasting time trying to figure out what to put in the outline about each scene, it gives me time to consider the scene and how it fits within the rest of the manuscript. Its surprising how many details you forget when you have your head down writing for several weeks. This quick pass through the manuscript is helping to bring it all back.
This particular project has turned out to be a mystery. It isn't a mystery in the usual sense, with a corpse in the library, but it is a mystery all the same. As with all mysteries, someone is lying about something and that mean the author has to keep up with what each person is saying when. I think this outlining task is helping somewhat with that.
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