This is the step I’m on right now.  I’ve taken the 8000 word high-level outline and expanded it to about 15,000 words so far.  I’ll probably complete the outline at about 20,000 words or so.  At that point, I could do another pass and produce even more detail, but the story is really coming alive for me, so I don’t think that will be necessary.

When I begin writing scenes for the first real draft, I keep the outline in mind, but this is where I free-write.  The outline is the framework and helps me identify when my free-writing takes me off on new tangents.  Sometimes those tangents are awesome – a flash of inspiration that I could not have figured out unless I was in ‘the zone’ writing full scenes.  Sometimes they’re a bad idea that takes the story off a cliff.  Any time I break the framework, I need to go back and analyze how this change will impact the story.  Either it’s brilliant and the rest of the story needs to change as a result, or it’s a false-start that needs to be chopped.

If I decide to keep it, I have to make sure I can still maintain the story integrity.  I have to ask:  do my plot points and story arcs and character arcs still make sense?  Will pacing be right?  Will the ending still work?  Adjustments often need to be made.

This sometimes seems like a lot of work, but it’s actually a lot less than the alternative.  This way I can identify the impacts to the story early on and choose how to address it.  Before, I would keep writing, maybe all the way to the end of the story before I realized other components needed to be changed.  That would require an entire new draft, which was a lot more re-work and took a lot more time.

Through this blended outline/free-write approach, I’ve dramatically cut down how long it takes to write even a big-fat-epic-fantasy novel like mine.

How do you approach a new novel?