I may have stumbled upon a great way to outline a scene.

I’ve been wanting to find a way to get whole scenes on paper in a faster way – you know, sort of shorthand, such that I’m not spending all my time on one scene that will inevitably get changed as I make others. The point is to be able to put a bunch of scene-skeletons together and see what works, and what’s missing, and what needs fixing. ((Lately trying to follow the writing advice of Hollows goddess Kim Harrison)) But I had no idea what my shorthand looked like. I tried just, you know, skipping descriptions of things. But turns out I can’t. Heheh.

So yesterday, I had a scene in my head, and I didn’t want to forget it. I was at work, so I obviously couldn’t stop and write for half an hour. But I couldn’t lose this one. It was so clear in my head – visualized completely while driving around running errands. ((Backdrop of “The Ballad of Mona Lisa” by Panic! At The Disco)) So I flipped to the first clean page in my moleskine and scribbled “Hayley is walking” because that’s how it starts. And I kept scribbling. And it looks terrible on the page – but also sort of beautiful – because it doesn’t look like prose anymore. It’s mostly just clauses and it’s missing punctuation almost entirely, and I didn’t keep the lines uniform… But you know what? It looks like what I see in my head. It’s possibly one of the most accurate representations of my mental image I’ve written.

And the best part is, I’m certain I could take this…”word soup”…and turn it into a proper prose scene. The test will come when I try to write more scenes the same way. Here’s hoping this isn’t a one-hit wonder. Especially since this scene doesn’t even occur in R+S. Oops.

/cast iPod [The Bird and the Bee – My Love]