Celebrating Victories When They Come

I had a new experience in my writing life recently that I’m claiming as a major victory. Ideas often come to me at various times, just hints of characters or snippets of a story or plot. But I can’t recall a time when a robust, fairly fully formed flash of inspiration has struck. Until a few weeks ago.

Quickly showering between my morning exercise and running my daughter to a sports practice, an idea began to form. I contemplated the threads of the story while I hurriedly finished getting ready then rushed to jot down the idea in my phone’s notes app. The idea would not let me go. After dropping my daughter off, I jumped into my writing time by capturing the story that was unfurling with surprising speed and detail. My notes app soon proved insufficient, and I copied what I had recorded into a Word doc and continued pouring the concept out. Within a very short time, I had more than 4,000 words forming the start of a promising outline and an idea I was excited about.

This is so rare for me. As I’ve shared before, I am not naturally a plotter. Despite my best efforts, I tend toward pantsing or—at best—plantsing every time. So to have an idea hit me and then have words practically falling out of my brain in some semblance of order to give me a frame on which to build my story was tremendous.

Now, more than three weeks later, I have an outline and synopsis that I’ve been reviewing and tweaking. I’ve fleshed out several main and supporting characters and have a solid sense of where I’m going. I’m using a couple of plotting tools to make sure what I’ve mapped out hits the pacing and conventions expected in my novel’s genre. 

I’m not quite ready to share any more details about my story just yet, but I had to share this victory. As a writer who struggles with planning and plotting, this is huge for me. My habit is to start a project then get distracted by another shiny new idea and jump to that. So I often have several works in progress (WIPs) at once. It’s not a very efficient way to write, though I do believe it’s not all bad, as that practice gives me various options to pivot to when I’m stuck on something. 

But I suspect that habit creates more problems than solutions because it often makes it hard to finish something I’ve started. I wonder sometimes if it’s hard to finish a project because I’m not exactly sure where I’m going since I’m not using an outline or guide.

This new idea has produced more than twenty pages of a roadmap between my outline, synopsis, character sketches, and notes. Here’s to hoping this new project is something I will complete (without getting distracted by other WIPs) because I have a plan to follow.