I’m working on my next project (in case you hadn’t noticed by things like yesterday’s blog post ^_~). I told a friend what I was picking up for NaNoWriMo and her response was “How many times have you written that now?”

And so many of my poor readers and CP’s know the story, the characters, the snippets I ramble about whenever I can. And she had a very good point. This will be my fourth year trying to write this story. I decided to do something with it I’ve never done before. I scrapped all the old writing. I still have the general ideas for certain scenes, but the old stuff is gone. (I always subtracted existing words from my word count goals).

It took me forever and ever to figure out what my problem was with this story. When I first started writing it, I thought it might be cool if it was a series of loosely connected, but stand-alone, short stories. An anthology instead of a novel. And the original ideas for this story were all individual scenes with their own conflict and resolution and very little binding thread between them all.

That was my problem with making it a novel. It wasn’t in my head. So Actaeon dates a muse in one story and a goddess in another, and loses them both and…how does that all tie together and bring me to a final conclusion?

When I got rid of those individual tales – as much as I could anyway – and brought myself back to the basic concepts of the story instead of the details, suddnely all the pieces clicked into place. Instead of looking at a series of short stories, I could see how everything snapped together like a well-made puzzle that created a large picture.

It’s how I pounded out those words over the last two days. It’s why the more I get into this, the more I realize I can’t write without an outline. A roadmap not that says “And then Conner went to the store, and bought some smokes, and thought about picking up a hooker.” But one that says “At this point  in the story, the inciting incident causes Actaeon to lose his faith in humanity and the gods, sending him into a spiral of depression, which he can only start to climb out of when he meets someone with the right outlook on life.”

It all has to have a way to tie together.

I know, this is like basic storytelling 101, but knowing something and understanding it are two diffrent beasts and let’s just call this week one massive lightbulb moment ^_^

What kind of fantastic revelations have you had this week?