On Tuesday I spent about six hours writing 1,800 words that filled three single-spaced pages without any breaks or indentations. This was a document that I start for every major project I write, entitled “Talking it out.” This is the embryo of a book.
Today, I will attempt to construct a preliminary bone structure for this new creation, which might look something like an outline. My outlines are nothing like the complexity of a human skeleton, but look more like a stick figure. Here there is a leg, so probably there should be another one of roughly the same size next to it. More will be added to it later, after it has some room to grow and develop on its own. My last book started with a simple ten-point outline. At the midway point, I had forty-six plot points that I printed out on slips of paper and arranged and re-arranged in a tree on my kitchen table.
My last book, entitled “The Other Side of Silence” and in my notes as “Spiritual,” has been cast out onto the waters of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. It is just a touch insane for me to submit my treasured work to that particular contest. A contest that chewed me up and spit me out along with my grand efforts at transcending gender roles a mere year ago. But the rationale of last year still works now; it’s motivation to really finish the book and stop picking at it, and it delays the necessity of querying that book so I can start working on my next project. So off it goes, to try its legs in the real world. Mary Shelley referred to her writing as her “hideous progeny.” I’m a little less dramatic, and might choose something more like my “awkward toddlers.”