Possible New YA Sci-Fi Book

[anthimeria]

So I've been doing a lot of fiddly things while my laptop isn't working, including drafting (and drafting and drafting) the query letter for Skywatch and thinking about a sequel and worldbuilding for Moxie.

The other project I'm working on is sort of a bridge book between Skywatch and Moxie.  Don't get me wrong--the books have NOTHING to do with each other.  It's just, making the jump from a middle grade steampunk utopia  to a borderline-adult YA superhero is fairly drastic, not to mention the fact that Moxie's still not ready to be the next rough draft in my queue and I'm in need of a book to write.  So I'm working on a sort of for-the-author bridging book: YA, but Percy Jackson-level YA instead of Hunger Games-level YA.  It's also space opera-y sci-fi, a genre I don't write much in but have recently wanted to.

While I do all the prep work and try to decide whether I actually want to write this book, I'm also having another debate with myself.  That is, what should my outline-to-draft process be?  I've talked about it before, and with the extremely action-oriented plot of this book, I'm thinking about possibilities other than the same process I used for The Novel, Skywatch and Sanctuary. 

Especially since it didn't really WORK.  Or, well, it did, but not terribly well.  The Novel needed a new ending, Skywatch's revisions have been monumental, and Sanctuary got shelved.

I've noticed the things I'm missing from my writing are the things best corrected in later drafts: rising stakes and "this action serves the plot but not truly the character." And a way to solve that might be while writing, in a seat-of-the-pants "What's the worst possible thing that could happen right now?" and "I've already written four chapters with this character, I know better how they'll react now."

 

The caveat for seat of the pants writing is that it takes SO MUCH editing later to get to a point where the plot falls together and add in needed stuff and eliminate unnecessary stuff and--blargh, just, Skywatch needed (and got!) a year of editing, but I don't want to do that again if I don't have to.

 

Can I compromise? Can I do the character building and worldbuilding and research first (that's not in question), then thoroughly outline the first act, and then do a sort of bullet-point outine with ideas and a thrust to get us to the endgame but not the many-pages-of-prose outline that act one had? And then at that point, I'd write Act One. Get in the characters' heads, feel out their interactions, etc. Then, once I've written act one, I could decide if I'm going to try seat-pantsing it with the vague-ish outline from then on or if, now that I know the characters a little better, I should thoroughly outline the rest? Maybe at that point I should also go back and re-read and edit and actually think about the beginning, before I move on.  It would be a sort of pause to figure out my best next move.

 

I LOVE ripping through a rough draft.  So much.  But every book I've written or attempted has needed major overhauling later on, and I'd like to figure out a way to avoid that. As a writer, you have to go with what works, and if you haven't found what works yet, keep trying new things.

Right, I've about convinced myself of it.  I'll probably have to talk myself into it a few more times, though.