A fresh start!
Greetings, friends!
Today I'm thinking about starting over. I'm not scrapping the whole novel or anything, but I'm at a stage in this project where I'm finally able to understand the characters and places well enough to see the gaping plot holes in my initial plans for the story. And so, I'm taking a big leap of faith and re-doing my whole outline. I've drawn a grid on my whiteboard with calendar dates along the X-axis and characters/storylines along the Y-axis, and am slowly beginning to fill in each square with index cards of plot points. I have 3 squares filled so far, which leaves 63 to go. And once that's done, it will be a matter of recycling all the unwieldy chapters I've written so far to fit into this new structure.
It's a risk, taking something that you've established over a long period of time and upending it. Some of what you've made will survive of the upheaval, and some of it will wind up in the dumpster where it belongs. On a related note, I am thinking about our current…