... Bella can still play a hell of a game of cards.
Okay. This may not be too wise, but I'm going to share a little behind-the-scenes.
Every writer has a different theory of outlines. Some don't even bother with them (these are known as "Pantsers," i.e., writing by the seat of the pants). Some adhere to them like dogma.
Me? I'm somewhere in the middle. I like a good outline, and indeed there comes a point in writing any long piece where I need one in order to make any progress. I'm not a pantser, in general.
But just as Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke observed that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, so too have I discovered that no outline I've ever made survives contact with my characters.
(To give you an idea of how this works, in the very first outline of Thunderstruck, Gail was a side character, and Stella exited the story by Chapter 4. That plan dropped over the far horizon a long time ago.)
As a consequence of this phenomenon, my outlines tend to be on the loose side. My latest outline for Thunderstruck, generated back before my hiatus, is a sketchy number that has nevertheless served as my compass for better than a decade.
Only now I'm not so sure it's the right way to go.
This time, it's not pushy characters insisting they aren't ready to be written out yet. My sense of the old outline's inadequacy is more a matter of how I've changed as a writer since I came up with it.
I can't really go deeper into details without laying out plot elements and potential spoilers I don't want to reveal. In a nutshell, though, I'm going to have to sit down with that outline and do some serious thinking. Fortunately, the holidays are coming up, and that's often a good time to reflect.
What does this mean to you as readers? Hopefully, nothing. With any luck, I will be able to pivot to whatever new outline I devise with such balletic grace that nobody would ever think I had ever planned anything else. It's possible. Although Thunderstruck does have a rather large Jenga tower of continuity to manage, and a few blocks may go by the wayside in the process.
Hopefully just a few.
However, I can declare my commitment not to take another extended hiatus. One is more than enough.
Anyway, that's the state of affairs right now, at least as much as I can reveal. Hope you are all having a good holiday season, and thank you for sticking with me as I try to find my way to a satisfying end to this tangled story.
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