Last week a friend of mine had to talk me out of deleting the draft of my new book. I told her I was “this” close to just sending it all to the recycle bin and then also throwing out all of my notes and sketches—EVERYTHING! I’d come to the point where I HATE my story.

Of course she told me to back away from the delete button and not to dare delete it. I pouted and said fine. 😄

Now, do I actually hate this new story? Yes, dammit, yes! No, I guess not. But I do hate writing it right now. All my characters are doing nothing interesting, going through the motions of the outline/plot I created. Dum, da-dum, here we go.

So like Ross and Rachel: time for a break. 😊

Which leads me to my next thought: Plot vs. Pants

A Pantser gets a Plot

If you’ve followed my blog, you know that when I wrote The Mark of the Artist, I did not have an outline or a detailed plot of any kind. I knew pretty much what the story was about, and how the end would go, but I didn’t know exactly how Sebastian, Anna, Argento, and James would get there. And I knew who my villain was and how he operated, but I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen to Knell.

It took me literally YEARS to finish. But—it was exciting, interesting, and so many wonderfully weird ideas came to me as I (eventually) wrote the story out.

But like I said it took years to finish and eventually publish. So this time around I was determined not to take that damn long, and oh my lord I made a plot! It is approximately 25 pages long, split into two parts, has side characters, settings, historical tid-bits since it’s set in the CA Gold Rush era, and cool back stories.

And I’m SO bored with it.

There’s nothing left to discover.

My characters already know where they’re going, what they will encounter, and how it all ends up because I know.

So now what? What was the point of writing out the whole plot if the “story” is written? I mean, I can just read the bullet points of each chapter and say, well that’s cool, neat story and be done with it.

So I ask my fellow writers: when you plot out the story, do you feel trapped by your plot? Like now it’s just homework: “ok today is chapter 5, get that done”?  Do you follow your plot, or is it more like guidelines?

And, how do you know when it is just time to walk away from a story? Especially one you’ve spent time, effort, and emotions on?

How can we as writers keep that spark of creativity and discovery alive when there’s a road already paved? This style just is very foreign to me so I’m looking out into the ether for answers from the void (or the interest, I guess!)

For now, I’m putting this story aside, taking that break, and changing my focus away. Reading a bit more, ignoring it. Focusing on the kiddos and their back-to-school madness (more on that soon). I even decided to make a new embroidery project, though it has a picture that reminds me of my story, so yeah, guess it won’t be that much of a break.