Book Done Yet? It’s Time for a Plan

So I’m working my way through twelve years of drafts (no exaggeration, the earliest ones are dated 2002) and I realize this book has passed through so many versions that there are actually different books here. It’s a mess.

In one version Zelda and Beth (who will become Scylla) write biographical cookbooks and Rose is trying to bribe them into acting as maid and cook for a week by offering them her diaries. That one’s farfetched, but I could make it work especially since just one of the files from the dozens in that version is 22,000 words.

Then there’s the latest version which is Zelda coming to the house to look through the diaries and scrapbooks in the attic to find out who her father is and getting roped into the Christmas party with Scylla. That’s the one with ghosts, and ironically, it’s not as farfetched.

I could try to combine the two, but that’s just compounding problems in both versions. No, what I have to do is stop reading through a zillion drafts and make a plot plan. Start with turning points and acts, figure out the big scenes in each act (I’m that far along on the draft that that’s feasible), and then pull those scenes from the mass of material I’ve already written and slot them into the new story docs or put them on the list of scenes to be written.

I really hate doing plot plans. I love thinking about plots, the whole what-if bit, but actually sitting down with graph paper and plotting a book out? No. It’s like sticking a pin through a butterfly. And yet, given the mess I’ve made by stretching the writing on this out over more than a decade, a plot plan is the only way out. Graph paper and then Curio.

So I’ll shove all the drafts away, and start with the five turning points. Maybe make a synopsis, that would be good. (Post on writing a synopsis coming up on Writing/Romance on Monday.) Get the entirely of the story in my head in its simplest form.

And then start dumping drafts in the trash as fast as I can because I’m drowning in them. It doesn’t matter how much I like a scene I wrote in 2004; if it doesn’t fit the synopsis/plot plan, it goes into the trash.

Okay, THAT’s a plan.

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