Revising as I write

I just wrote my way through a small revision in my novel Dominion. I had reached a point in my outline where I felt like I was wandering, like the outline wasn’t fleshed out enough and wasn’t doing its job.

The feeling was pronounced enough that I revised this part of the outline. I stopped writing prose, and asked myself what the problems were. What was this part of the novel trying to accomplish? What needed to happen here? Where did my characters need to be by the time it was over?

Based on these questions, I rearranged some of the scene cards, added new scenes to my outline, and deleted others. After I felt good again about my intended course, I started at the beginning of this section of scenes (maybe seven scenes?) and started writing and rewriting prose.

Progress couldn’t be defined by word count here. Sometimes a scene would be shorter by the time I was finished and the total word count actually went down.

Progress was defined by a scene being “repaired” according to the new outline, regardless of word count. So as long as the scenes were being fixed and I was regularly continuing to the next scene, that was progress.