Nothing wrong with that either. Sondheim's Into the Woods is famously a musical that mixes multiple fairy tales, sending a host of characters out on their hero's journeys, bringing them home for Happy Ever After. Then comes Act II...
Some people do spread sheets. There are a lot of ways to try to map puzzle pieces, character arcs, story beats, character meetings, travel from location to location. People also fill out long forms of background, character biographies, more maps... I didn't feel this story needed or wanted that. It is an origin story wrapped in a mystery served with just a single POV character. It just isn't that complex, structurally speaking.Yeah, I do have a Scrivener folder that puts together some research materials and has a page for each major character. Those pages are largely empty, however. I'm a fan of discovery writing because there are organic things that happen within the actual on-the-page interaction. When you try and construct a conversation between two fictional people, you discover questions you didn't realize needed to be asked. When you put a character into a realized world with all its complexities and warts, you stumble into situations you hadn't projected.
It is easy to write in your character bio, "He doesn't use money" but a lot tougher to actually navigate them through a modern city.
Which is all leading up to that I hit Chapter Four and stopped dead.
I love the kind of questions that open up for examination the unstated assumptions that created the problem. Sometimes up the chain, multiple times, until you have Carl Sagan'd yourself into asking questions about the origin of the universe itself.
My outline said of Chapter Four that Penny pretends to be an archaeologist. I started tackling that problem as I went into draft; what tools is she going to use to pull it off. Then I realized it was as much a question who she was trying to trick. Then I had to ask why she would do this in the first place -- a question my outline hadn't addressed. That in turn asked me to explore how she feels about archaeology, history, her own skills. And what her background is; turns out what was in the bio sheet wasn't enough to answer these questions.The nice thing about an outline, though, is it gives you an overall structure. I know where I can bend, what is open to be explored, and where I have to stay within the envelop lest the plot fall apart.
So at the end of a couple of days of thinking about it during work and scribbling notes during my breaks I had come to a better understanding of the forces driving her character. I now know why and when she was in theatre and why she got out and what she does for a living now. I know how she feels about crowds and strange places and the when and where of when she has confidence in her physical and technical competencies (and what those are). In short, a more defined character and a better character voice.
And, sure, it is going to change a lot of what I wrote already but that's okay. I expected I'd have to go back and forth a little, especially in the early chapter. Besides, a draft is like an outline. Once it is there, you have an idea of the basic structure works and how far you can bend it before it breaks.
So, yeah. This is an outline "failure" if you think the point is to write continuously, never blotting a line, through all your daily goal word counts and out to the finish of something resembling a draft. But I'd say if the goal was making a story...it is still working pretty well.
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