I’m almost reluctant to admit that planning a story has greatly improved my output. I recently took part in the NaNoWriMo challenge for April and my goal was to edit/rewrite for 1 hour every day, using an outline.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with outlines, it’s basically planning the story before writing it. For me, this meant coming up with a lot of different scenes that I wanted to include and putting them in the right sequence before I started writing.

Honestly, I can’t believe why I’ve never tried it before because it actually works. And the result is:

• 2 finished 1.drafted stories
• 1800 hours done editing
• 30 000 words written

And all this in just 12 days. If only I was this efficient all year round.

The only obstacle that remains is to get those two stories from the 1-draft into something that is ready for publishing. I guess I better sign up for the next NaNoWriMo event in July.