Update: Two steps forward, one step back; or, whoops, that’s not working

An example of It’s Not Working, BIG PROBLEM:

You take the story in a specific direction and then find yourself moving more and more slowly, more and more reluctant to keep going, until you find yourself stuck. Generally speaking, this means you went the wrong way with the plot.

Solution One: Back way up, to the part of the story where you were happy. Read from there until you hit the part where you feel uneasy or unhappy. Cut everything from there forward and rename the new file Working Title 2. (Or 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or in my case 8 is the highest I ever got with this problem, and it was painful.)

Anyway, now that you have gotten rid of the part that probably wasn’t working, read the whole manuscript to the part where you now stop. Then take the dogs for a long walk, or go for a walk by yourself, I guess, while you listen to music, not a podcast or audiobook. Doodle around with ideas for where the story might go. Jot down a very casual outline. Or, if you normally outline, then maybe take a stab at revising the current outline extensively.

Once a different idea occurs to you, hopefully it will immediately feel better, much more right for the story. There you go, problem solved. Complete the story. If a different idea doesn’t occur to you, go to Solution Two.

Solution Two: Put the WIP away for a year and write something else. Then try knocking the troublesome WIP into better shape again. (This is how I generated Invictus 8 before I got to the right direction for the story. This is why that took years.

An example of It’s Not Working: SMALL PROBLEM:

You’re going in the right direction, but you’re increasingly unhappy anyway. You move more and more slowly and become more and more reluctant to move forward at all.

For me, this means, you’re doing the scene wrong. And in particular what it means is: You’re trying to skip over something that’s too important to leave out.

As you have realized, HEDESA has now overshot the length I wanted to hit in draft (210,000 words). It’s 20,000 words beyond that. I had ONE chapter to write last week, and by gum I still have ONE chapter to write now, and this is annoying. What happened?

Well, I got impatient and tried to speed things up and get to the ending. Then I got increasingly unhappy. Saturday night I realized why: I was summarizing stuff that needed to be on the page. How did I figure this out? By getting uncomfortable with typing “had this” and “had that.” I love the past perfect and I get annoyed when authors WILL NOT USE IT WHEN THEY SHOULD, because for crying out loud, it is a LEGITIMATE VERB TENSE that EXISTS FOR A REASON. However, if you find yourself using a lot of past perfect, that means —

–You’re summarizing something, meaning telling about it after the fact.

–You’re in a flashback, and need to really pay attention to smoothing out the verb tenses in that flashback, maybe slide into simple past tense for most of it, with the past perfect for the entry and exit. Have fun! Because this sort of fiddling work with verb tenses is not for the timid! (Meaning, I personally have to really focus and take this seriously in order to smooth out the flashback.)

But say it’s the former. Then are you summarizing something unimportant? Great. But if you’re summarizing something that ought to carry impact — I mean, emotional heft of any kind — then maybe you should think again about whether summarizing is the right decision. If you’re unhappy about it, there you go: it was the wrong decision.

Or that’s pretty much how it works for me, as far as I can tell. As soon as this occurred to me — as I say, Saturday night — I sighed and shut the laptop, and Sunday morning I knew exactly what I wanted to do, meaning back up and pull the important part into story-present rather than summarize so much of it. So I did, and then I selected a place to end chapter 27 and started chapter 28, because naturally this increased length. So now I’m thinking 28 chapters, not counting a probable short epilogue-ish chapter to bring this story to a conclusion and set up the next installment.

Easter Weekend is coming up. It’s a four-day weekend and I am determined to finish this draft NO MATTER WHAT, so I hope nothing dire will unexpectedly interfere.

Meanwhile!

Magnolia ‘Woodsman,’ the very latest of my spring-flowering magnolias to bloom. Obviously it’s nothing like as showy as a white-flowering magnolia that flowers before the leave open, but it’s so interesting and I do appreciate its odd greenish-tannish-pinkish flowers.

A smoke tree (Continus), unfurling her leaves. This particular smoke tree does not “smoke” very well. The flowers never fluff out the way they’re supposed to. Why not? Because the nursery sold me a female plant, and this was dishonest of them and if I remembered which nursery it was, I would tell you because people should be irritated when nurseries pull a fast one and sell plants that are not true-to-name. However her leaves are still pretty, even if her flowers are nothing to admire.

We’ll wind up wit a dog pic, in the theme: Oh no, I would never CAGE my DOG! Crate training is bad because dogs hate crates!

This crate is never closed. It’s there because first, it helps frame the “foyer,” which keeps dogs from dashing out the front door, and second, because the dogs really, really like it. The other day, Maximilian was on top of this crate and poor Connor could not get up there and he gave me SUCH a pathetic look. However, I heartlessly allowed the cat to stay there, since he got to that spot first.

Morgan is just as likely to go on top as below. Joy and Haydee both vastly prefer being inside the crate. Haydee is distressed here because she wants to curl up in this crate, but with Morgan and Joy, she doesn’t have room.

Digression:

In case anybody wonders, sure, dogs prefer to have the door open rather than closed. However, crate training means they’re not upset when the door is closed. This is handy, for example, post-disc surgery, when the neurosurgeon tells you, “If she jumps off the couch, that could be catastrophic, so seriously, keep her confined for six weeks. I’m not kidding here.”

And yes, I actually use an x-pen rather than a crate post-surgery most of the time, but that is still confinement and even then, crates are a crucial tool, and I do wonder how dog owners handle this kind of thing when they refuse to crate their dogs. Simply allow catastrophic reinjury? Do super-fast crate training under highly non-ideal circumstances, with a dog who was not taught to accept confinement earlier in life and is now both post-surgery and upset at being confined? I’ve needed to do serious confinement multiple times, and I can definitely state that a dog who accepts confinement easily and is only bored rather than upset will have a much easier time when confinement is not optional. Trazadone is fine and great and very useful, but will not compensate for the distress created by failure to crate-train earlier in life.

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