On Plotting

You know that feeling when you're singing a song you used to know
well? In your mind you're groping ahead of what your mouth is singing,
trying to recall the next line.

Five seconds into the future is murky. The connections between the
favorite lines that you can remember is unclear. Somehow, though, as
you finish each line the next one leaps to your lips after it, like a
bridge materializing beneath your steps.

That's pretty much what most fiction writing feels like for me. My
plot outlines in advance are extremely loose. It's only as each event
is fully described that the next one achieves some kind of clarity.
When this works, it's beautiful and satisfying, I'm surfing on top of
the wave.

However, when it fails, I'm pretty much left with nothing. Once I lose
that momentum, it can be days or even weeks before I can get the
narrative engine going again. "Oh, just make something up!" I tell
myself in frustrationm, but everything seems patently false.

The other danger, when I stop for too long in one place, is that I'll
cease to be persuaded by the characters I wrote. "Oh, this isn't
really what he would do," I start to think, "this whole story is
impossible." So far I've managed to supress it when it came on. I've
done the too-much-of-a-perfectionist-to-actually-write-anything thing.
I've done it for years, and it's much less fun than being an
imperfectionist, and taking the little felicities when they come among
the compromises and kludges that allow one to actually put something
out.

vinnie_tesla@yahoo.com