I am a firm believer in planning. I’m also a firm believer in throwing plans out the window. In other words, I believe there need to be lines, but you need to be willing to color outside of them when appropriate.
This weekend, I had to spend time planning out the rest of the novel. Now this isn’t going to be a huge planning post — I’ll do that when I plan out the next novel. However, I am going to talk about the evolution of the plan.
When I started the novel I had a roughly 25 point plan of important points for the novel. As I’ve progressed, I finesse the plan. Amazingly enough, even after covering 10 or so points from the original plan, I end up with roughly 25 points in the new one. At the point I’m down to the last 25,000 words or so. I now have a 27 point plan for the remainder of the novel.
One of the reasons I’ve decided I had to take a couple of days to plan out the remainder of the novel is because one of the things that I hate most in a book is when they resolve everything in the last ten pages. I much prefer an ending that goes with the flow of the story, instead of one crammed into the final couple of chapters. In my story, there are several storylines, which flow from the “discovery” of key pieces of information. There are two major revelations, as well as a couple of minor ones (as a side note, for those of you who didn’t get my direct statement or metaphor at the beginning of the post, here’s an example of having a plan and throwing it out: at the beginning of the writing process, there were two major revelations. In the last 30,000 words of so, one of the two has become a minor revelation, replaced by a new major revelation; if your plans are inflexible then you can miss out on an even better storyline).
So, with the first major revelation about to come out, I felt I really needed to write out a guideline as to where I was going, so I ended up with good spacing among the revelations. With that done, I feel like I’m ready to tackle the end game and get this draft finished!
