I had to stop writing for a bit because I had to go through the copyedits for Of Noble Family, and then the holidays and now here we are. Chapter 16 is up, for those of you reading along.
I also stalled out, which is a thing that happens sometimes, because I felt like I needed to make a change to the outline, but it was a fairly large one and I spent some time second-guessing myself. I finally just made a copy of the outline, cut the scenes I thought I needed to cut and added the new ones. Lo! It works much better. This, of course, is the point of an outline. It allows me to try a variation on the novel in small form, without committing all of those words to the page.
Of course, that only works if you have a brain built to fill in the gaps in a wire frame rendering of your novel. Mine is, which I think is related to my days as a puppet builder/set designer. Not everyone’s is so I don’t expect this trick to work for everyone, but it’s worth trying a couple of times to see if it’ll be a good fit for you.
Granted, every single time, I dig my heels in rather than just going ahead and trying the alternate. Even after I can tell that I really should do it because I’ve stopped writing the version I had originally planned.
That — by the way — is a trick that I think every writer can use. If you start getting bored with your own novel, something has gone of the rails. The hard part is figuring out what it is. The harder part is learning how to fix it.
That’s what practice is for.
