Some of you will accuse me of beating a dead horse (I know, it’s a
cliché, but it works here) when you
realize this blog post is about outlining,
but I’m excited.
I have mentioned in a few other blogs (click here) that I am working on a new novel—The Orange and the Black. Unlike my last endeavor, I am outlining this one.
I was approaching the first plot point, the event which will spin the story into a new realm, and realized that as things were unfolding in my head, there was not enough momentum. Something else needed to happen. The problem was I didn’t know what that something needed to be. I was up against a wall. The more I thought about the situation, the bleaker it became. A week into the outline and my second novel had fallen flat.
Then I realized there was nothing to worry about. I had answered my own question. All I have invested so far in this novel is a week. I can afford to put the whole thing in a box, put it on a shelf, and let it ferment for a while. Besides, there was a short story I want to write.
That was two weeks ago. Yesterday I was walking the dog when the first glimmer of a solution struck me. Two bags of dog poop later, I had the answer. It requires that I go back and change some earlier events so that everything works, but since I am still in the sentence outline phase, those changes can easily be made.
Part of this is realizing one of the secrets to writing, or figuring out so many of life’s other problems. The subconscious deals with issues so much better. Your conscious mind is always in we-got-a-problem-and-we-need-a-solution-now mode. The subconscious has a different approach. It’s more of, “Yeah, yeah. Look, this problem is not going anywhere, so let’s just think about it for a while.”
So now I have a solution. I have a short story that needs finishing, however, so the novel can sit on the shelf a little longer. It is not going anywhere.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo by fugzu [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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