I’m more than 14,000 words into the new book, and I think it’s going well. This method of scene-by-scene outlining seems to be working. I’ve had a couple of cases when it turned out that what I’d planned as two separate scenes morphed into one as some events turned out not to be as big as I’d imagined. I’m sure there will be some tinkering in revision. But otherwise I feel like it’s focused what I’m doing.

Now I’m at the point when I need to do a little more outlining. I’ve got the next few scenes planned, but I need to dig a little deeper into them before I write them. I’ve seem a few different versions of the mental movie and need to pick which one I’m going with. There’s an incident that I keep moving around. I’m not sure if it goes in this scene or a later scene.

I’m at the part where the story really kicks into gear, so it should be fun, if a little trickier, to write. And I’m afraid I’m about to launch into all-or-nothing mode, where I don’t want to take my brain out of this story.

However, as today is Pi Day (3-14), I may have to pause to make a pie. I may see if I can cut a recipe down enough to make a 1-2 serving pie so I won’t have leftovers for days. Cooking is good for thinking.

I also think I’m going to have to pause to draw a couple of maps. I need a good layout for the place I’m trying to create so i can keep it all straight.

Just as I was ready to start writing yesterday, I realized that I’d hit another issue I tend to struggle with: specificity.

I knew my heroine inside and out, and I’d figured out bits about some of the other characters, but most of the secondary characters my heroine would be interacting with in the opening of the book were shapeless blobs. Even in my mental movie, they were essentially the adults in a Charlie Brown special — offscreen and just making noise. So, I needed to get specific about things I tend to handwave over. I had to name these people, think of what they looked like and what sort of people they were, what their relationship was to the heroine and how they’d be likely to interact.

It’s amazing what I uncovered while doing this. Not only did my mental movie get a lot more sharp and vivid, but I figured out some stuff that may affect the plot and that will definitely add some depth to the story. Now my heroine’s parents aren’t just generic parents. They’re people with personalities and their own goals and beliefs. I also realized I haven’t been entirely concrete about my settings and surroundings. In my mental movie, I see the characters moving through vague settings, and I’m not sure I could put that into words.

I may need to write “be specific!” on the sticky note I have covering my laptop’s camera so I won’t forget. When I’m tempted to just toss something off, I need to force myself to dig into it.

Today’s task is to do some visual world building. I know the history and culture, but I realized I don’t know exactly what it looks like. There may be map drawing.

It is possible that I’m procrastinating on the moment when a potential book has to become a real one by being put into words, but all this stuff is making it so much richer. Yesterday I would have said I was ready to start writing, but what I would have written yesterday morning is so much weaker than what I’d write today, and I suspect that what I write Monday will be so much stronger than what I’d write today if I started writing today. One of my general weaknesses about writing is that I’m impatient. I want to jump right into it and get started, and that means some things aren’t as well developed as they should be. I’m going pretty quickly from the first germ of idea to getting ready to write, and it’s easier to develop all this now and weave it in as I write than it is to try to fit all that in after I’ve written a vague draft.

I normally consider myself some sort of unholy cross between a “plotter” and a “pantser” when it comes to writing. I can’t seem to start writing a book without at least a bit of a high-level outline — something like the stages on the hero’s journey — but then I never truly know what the book is about until I’ve written it, and then I have to do a lot of rewriting.

For the book I’m developing now, I’m trying something new and doing a scene-by-scene outline, digging into each scene to look at how it progresses the plot, how it affects the protagonist, where the conflict is, what the emotional pivot is, and what the result is. I haven’t started actually writing yet, and I can already tell a difference.

For one thing, there was a scene I envisioned that I thought did a good job of showing what the heroine’s issues were and building toward the decision she ultimately makes. But once I started digging into the scene, I realized I didn’t need it at all. The emotional beats were identical to those in the previous scene, and all this scene did was delay the start of the main action. I think previously I would have written the scene and then agonized over cutting it. This way, while outlining the previous scene I already knew I wouldn’t need the next one, so I didn’t waste a lot of time on it. I’d seen the mental “movie” of it, and I think I got some character insight from it. Some of the bits I like from that scene will probably end up in a later scene that’s more pivotal. The time I spent thinking about it isn’t wasted, but I’ve also saved myself a lot of writing time.

Then there’s something about analyzing a scene this way that forces you to see the nuts and bolts and how they work. One problem I had with a previous project I struggled with and then shelved was that my agent kept telling me my heroine wasn’t proactive enough. She did make decisions about how she reacted to things, but the major turning points in the story were all her reacting to other people’s actions rather than her taking action, and once I’d written the book, it was really hard to fix it without starting from scratch (which is why it’s shelved, at least temporarily).

Once I started digging into my planned scenes, I realized I was doing the same thing all over again. The heroine gets an opportunity to do something, and her parents bring it to the clan leader to decide. The clan leader rules on it, then assigns the heroine to prepare herself for it. After smacking myself on the head when I saw the pattern, I changed it so that the heroine is the one suggesting bringing it to the clan leader for a ruling, then the clan leader leaves the decision up to her, and then the heroine is the one seeking to train to prepare herself. These are minor tweaks to make now, but if I’d already written these scenes when I noticed it, it would have been more difficult. Even if I changed a few sentences to make it her decisions, the emotions and tone wouldn’t have been quite right, and the inner conflict would have been different.

And then after I fixed all that, in a later scene I caught myself setting it up that someone offers her help when really it should have been her asking for help.

Doing this kind of analysis before writing can also help fix those problem scenes — the scenes you need to convey information and set something up but that don’t really have any kind of inherent conflict. By digging into the potential and looking for conflict, I moved the scene to a new setting, made it more active, and added elements from a subplot to it. Now the main plot purpose may be mostly exposition and setup, but there’s stuff going on from a subplot to make it a real scene. I’m not sure I’d have noticed the problem if I’d just written the scene the way I originally thought of it.

Of course, the moment of truth will come when I have to actually start writing and I see if the plans translate well into actual words. That will likely come later today.