The Writer's Junkyard

I've started a new manuscript and to my surprise, it was a challenge putting words on the page. I found myself struggling with the perpetual dilemma--either going forward as a panster or as an outliner. For the last few years I've been a ghostwriter and prided myself on churning out prose like a machine. In order not to waste my client's time, we'd discuss the story and I'd put together a chapter outline. I cautioned the client that an outline was a place to deviate from but at least the narrative had direction.

If this worked well for me as a ghostwriter, why not an outline for my book?  Honestly, I tried but my story became a jumbled mess. I had several challenges, the first being world building. Although I'm writing about modern Denver, a place I'm very familiar with, the issue was, what to tell? How to capture the ambiance of the city without bogging down into a travelogue? And the plot involved characters from a social environment outside my experience--conniving politicians, treacherous gangsters, and overworked, cynical police officers. Writing a thriller set in space or one involving vampires and werewolves, no problem. Readers in that genre are quite willing to suspend disbelief. But write a story, even in obvious fictionalized form, about the contemporary world and the bar to hold the reader's trust is much higher. Plus, writers often talk about the "white room," a scene where characters are little more than disembodied voices. I had the opposite problem, the creative space in my head was like a junkyard, crammed with pieces of research and ideas that I'd accumulated. There was so much detail that I got overwhelmed and my word count stalled. 

I tried the technique of writing chapters as separate episodes instead of chronologically. I found myself wrestling with the story timeline and the risk of devoting too much attention to secondary characters in a way that would derail my original plot. So I took the advice that we published writers give to newbie scribes, and to quote Pablo Picasso: "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."

Thus self-chastised, I returned to my proven strategy of sitting at the keyboard and proceeding from beginning to end. Before I knew it, I was ten chapters in, a quarter of the way through this new book. Spoiler alert. Expect lots of murder in the near future.