It’s been a long six (nine?) months. I lost my job in December, found a new one in February and then worked for exactly 1 day in March before being transferred to work from home. Between the stress of being unemployed, the fear and anxiety of being unemployable, and then a deadly virus, my creative reserves are zero.
I finally took the time to sit with one of the unfinished works gathering dust in the hard drive of my laptop. I needed to not just re-read the story, but to feel it. To get back into the nitty gritty. It’s like planting a tree – I needed to get my hands into the dirt. I started small, tweaking a line here or a sentence there before I took a look at the whole story. The snipets were there, bread crumbs left for the reader to untangle, but I had lost the connection to them. I couldn’t remember why I was referencing a birthday party, for instance.
I’m a “pantser”. I just sit and write. Basically, I’m holding on to the story by the seat of my pans. I don’t plan (much). My characters tend to take me on a journey. I write this way for two reasons. For me, it’s just more fun to see what happens as the story line moves and if I know what happens in the end, I’m instantly bored and I won’t finish writing. This does have it’s drawbacks and leads to horrible nights editing later on, when I’m trying to remember the backstory I gave to a bit character who appeared on page 19 and was supposed to be a red herring, but then came back to have a major influence on page 133.
With all the chaos, I figured I’d try planning. That way, if I get stuck, I don’t have to delve as deeply into the weeds to get back on track. The planning I’m doing makes no sense to anyone but me, but at least it’s forward momentum in a story that’s been dormant for 9 months. It’s sparse too. Three lines perhaps, sometimes even just three words to convey all that I want to happen in a chapter. “P/J in woods – Tracking” or “Still on beach. Gets text”.
The planning paid off too – I found a major plot hole and I plugged it. It was definitely easier to fix when it’s a few sentences than when you’re 30 pages deep. One thing I’m not certain of is whether my plan will hold. If it does – great! If not, I can always come up with another plan. In these times of chaos, even this pantser needed something concrete.
The Connecticut Writers' Circle 