My Own Writing

 

I have been working on writing a book.  I am so excited to tell you that I finished my 1st draft of this book yesterday.  It is a contemporary YA book in the female 1st person POV.  I'm not going to go into details about the plot now, but I will say that my tentative title for the book is Imperfect.

When I started writing this book, I wrote a very short, and not-at-all thorough,  outline.  This outline had the chapter numbers, and a few brief words telling what would happen in the chapter.  I got to a point in my story when I no longer looked at this original outline at all.  First, it wasn't a good outline to begin with.  Second, I realized outlining just wasn't my style.  Third, my characters were surprising so much that my story was becoming different than I had expected.  The character that surprised me the most was the love interest's ex-girlfriend.  I expected her to just be the love interest's ex-girlfriend, but she ended up taking on a story of her own.

Now that I'm finished this 1st draft, I get to start the next step - revising.  I am both excited and scared for revising.  I'm going to give the book to my family to read now.  I'm looking forward to continuing this journey of book-writing.  Are any of you writing books?  If so, what's your style - pantser or outliner?  Do your characters ever end up surprising you?

Katie