I prefer writing to planning. I just want to get on with it. Sometimes, even stating what goes in the Beginning, Middle and End is too much effort.
However, to write something more complex than a single POV story I’ve got to plan out the storylines and how they fit together, otherwise I’ll stick with one or maybe two.
For the Welcome To Earth novel I’m in the middle of, I’ve got five Points Of View, and I developed them all pretty thoroughly.
The problem is, once I start writing a story, it almost always takes an entirely fresh turn from anything I’d planned. Sometimes lots of turns.
That can be good. I love finding out what happens as I write it.
But that doesn’t work with multiple storylines that need to interconnect.
Problem is, I never planned this story as a novel. I planned it as a pilot television script, and that’s how I originally wrote it.
And that’s why it all fell apart – it wasn’t suited to becoming a novel, but I thought it would be. I didn’t do any more planning to flesh it out.
And so there it was – forty-five pages of outline in script form, ready to be drawn from, and it wasn’t filled with enough detail.
The big divergence happened when I added an entirely new beginning, changing it from sets of two sequences to three (ie, three for the Beginning, Middle A, Middle B, and the End).
That means I now have to find and develop three entirely new sequences spread out over the entire novel – about 30-40,000 words.
Obviously, I got ‘writers block’. Or, in this case, ‘what the heck do I do with this mess now?’.
The only way I can see to fix it is to shift the main plot to a sub-plot and bring forward the story I’d intended for the sequel, and overlap them. Two storylines, one story. There simply isn’t enough happening in the original script to fill an entire novel.
If only I’d seen that before I began and reworked the outline/script.
The question now is, will it work? Is it even what I really want to do?
I guess I’ll find out.
If you liked this post, you might like my post on creating a writing/editing plan for your novel.