I’ve been developing a story idea, with a goal of starting to write after Easter. I don’t know if that will happen. I’ve got the main characters figured out and a good sense of the world, but I seem to be lacking a plot. I have a general sense of the main character’s inner growth arc and a big-picture goal, but I have no idea how to get there. I was feeling like I had a lot of the book figured out, but when I wrote down the scenes I knew, it was basically the first act before the story really gets going. The rest is a blank.

This is not a new problem for me. I don’t know how many first chapters I wrote before I actually managed to finish a book, but it took me more than ten years of playing at writing. I was great at coming up with situations and characters, but once I got the characters into those situations, I didn’t know where to go from there. There was a huge empty space between the character getting a mission or assignment and them succeeding in triumph.

I did manage to finish a few books before I started really learning how to plot, mostly because I was writing category romance, so there was a strictly defined structure built-in. It was all about the characters and situation. The conflict was built into the characters and situation, and you just had to go back and forth between attraction and conflict until they overcame the conflict. There wasn’t a lot of external plot.

I finally had an Aha! moment when I saw a workshop on the Hero’s Journey, and it started to make some kind of sense. Just knowing those major turning points helped me considerably. I was able to write Enchanted, Inc. based on that structure.

Since then, I’ve been kind of obsessed with learning about structure and figuring out the ways to put a plot together, but it can still be something of a challenge. Some books fall together easily. Some take a lot more work. Usually, the less focused I am to begin with, the harder it is to figure out a plot. I used to just work out the beginning (the part I usually know best) and have a vague outline and figure the rest would come to me as I started writing, but I’ve learned the hard way that it doesn’t work well for me when I try that. That’s when I have to do major rewrites of the sort where I scrap half the book and start over, or when I write the whole book, am never entirely happy with it, and my agent tells me it’s not something she thinks she can sell. I was the worst of both worlds between a “plotter” and a “pantser,” in that I couldn’t start writing without an outline, but the outline was so vague I didn’t have a lot of structure and got very lost, so I had to write the book to figure out what it was about, and then I had to rewrite it.

I’ve learned that the more detailed an outline I have and the more structure there is to that outline, the better the book ends up being for me. I can write it faster with less frustration and procrastination and I don’t have to do major revisions. I may still need to make changes, often adding or removing scenes, but the structure still mostly holds together. I do all that figuring out what the book is about and scrapping it and restructuring that in the outline rather than in the actual book.

That’s why I’m forcing myself to really think through this book and work out what the plot needs to be before I let myself start writing (well, I have written the first scene, but just because it came to me and I wanted to grab it before I forgot it). The more specific I get up front, the better the book ends up being. I still get ideas as I write and I can go with the flow, but I need that structural framework to begin with or it ends up being just a mess. So, that will be next week’s fun, in between choir rehearsals and services. If I have a good outline by the Monday after Easter, I’ll start writing. If not, then I’ll keep working on plotting.