Making a Run at It

In the TV show Ninja Warrior, athletes compete on a four-stage obstacle course.  Some obstacles include log rolls, spider climbs, and a salmon ladder, in which you hang from a bar and must jump the bar up a series of notches until you reach the top of the ladder.  At the beginning of each game, there are a hundred competitors, but most wipe out fairly early, and often times no one reaches the fourth stage.  To give you an idea of how tough it is – Olympic athletes have not been able to complete the course.
Certainly strength is essential in making it through the course; the athletes have to possess phenomenal body strength to haul themselves up and over objects or cling to narrow ledges with their fingertips.  But there is also a mental factor, and throughout the course you can see athletes pause to calculate the best possible approach.
This usually occurs at the warped wall, a 14-foot barrier that the competitors must scale.  They have to make a run up a short slope with enough momentum to leap and catch the top of the wall.  Typically it takes two or three tries before they get it; then they have to pull themselves up and over before moving on to the next challenge.

It’s always at the warped wall when I start to get tense (watching it.  I doubt I could do it) because the athletes are losing precious seconds while they gauge their approach.  And usually you can tell as soon as they take off whether or not they will make it.  There’s something about their plosive momentum that forecasts whether they have made the best calculation.
Tackling a new story is like scaling the warped wall. 
I’m standing here with my story plans right in front of me, a humongous barrier, and I know once I scale it, I will be off and running.
In my eagerness to get writing, I launch myself at the wall and get only so far up before I realize I can’t reach the top.  So, I slide back down and reconsider my approach.  Some approaches get me closer to the top, but typically I have to make a run at it several times again.
This may not be the best writing practice out there.  It consumes a lot of time making failed approaches at the plot.  The story hasn’t changed; I know what I want to write, but the problem is figuring out the best way to get into the story … on the other side of the wall.
When I was working on Dead Hungry, I wrote and rewrote the first nine chapters probably six or seven times.  The events in the chapters didn’t change much, but how I went about building the scenes did.  And while I had my cast of characters right from the beginning, they needed time to show me who they were.
So, now I’m back at the first draft of another novel, and again I can see the story I want to tell, but I’m having difficulty scaling that warped wall.  I’ve made three separate approaches so far, and none of them has quite worked.  What usually happens is that the story loses momentum and eventually stalls.  And if I’m losing interest in it, there is no way I can convince readers to keep going.
This morning I woke before the alarm and tried looking at the story from a new angle.  I’m not quite convinced that this will be the strategy to get me over the wall.  What I have to trust, though, is that this is part of my writing process.  And the obstacle is going to remain there until I figure out how to scale it.
It’s time to take a step back to the beginning of the slope.  My next run at it might be the one I need to get over.