Amy Sue Nathan

A brick wall

What happens when a pantser hits a brick wall?  She becomes a plotter.  No identity crisis here, but when I opened my Word doc and stared, picked my nail a bit, checked email again, read my previous paragraphs and realized I had no idea exactly what was next.

Of course I knew what was next in theory…who was going to do what and why, but the how escaped me.  I looked at my trusty notecards and all of a sudden they were an indiscernible mess, illegible almost, and i have rather neat handwriting.

I emailed my illustrious CP eleven, seventeen a few times to see what she thought.  The problem, I told her, was that I had been back and forth through so many versions and reincarnations of my work that I wasn’t sure what was really supposed to be next.  And if I didn’t know — who did?  Again, it’s the details that elude me, not the main threads.  But it’s all about the details, the dialogue, the conflict, the tension, the resolution.  And I’ve reorganized and rearranged so many times, I’ve rewritten scenes from other work so that it fits here.  I’ve reconfigured parts of this WIP so many times that it doesn’t at all resemble what I wrote when I began.  And that’s a good thing. I think.  I can’t remember.

At the end of my collision with my own stalled mind, I decided to use a pen and paper — like in the olden days — and plot.  The paper affords me space the 3×5 cards did not.  And no more of that I’ll-use-this-abbreviation-and-will-definitely-remember-what-it-means because frankly, I don’t.  I couldn’t make sense of those cards so the pile of them ended up in the trash, after I transcribed, to the best of my ability, anything that looked like English.

And then I stared at the papers, arranged them neatly with a tap on the desk and a pat on the sides and I tucked them into a binder.  I’ll use them as my literary compass should I lose my way again — and perhaps next time I won’t hit the wall at all.

One can hope!