The Little Mornings

Time Out

No page count this week. No pages, either. I thought I would feel bad the first time I missed a weekly goal, but I don’t. Because I just did a ton of work and turned this ship around.

Instead of just plugging along and feeling really ambivalent about it, I stopped and decided I did want a plot outline after all. I’m not used to a story of this scope, and it needs multiple plot threads and arcs. I needed a basic roadmap for all five members of my novel’s family, and notes about the other family members and significant others who show up. Characterization comes easily to me. Plot does not, and I wanted to feel like I had something planned that could actually be 275 pages, which wasn’t happening with what I was writing.

So I scribbled events on slips of paper, including events I’d thought of when I conceived of the novel that weren’t appearing in what I was writing so far, and started moving them around on my rug. I stood over it to see if it felt like there was actually rising action and a climax instead of just random episodes. I moved a child going missing, which was becoming a central event of my manuscript, into the first chapter where it provided strong but self-contained action to jumpstart the narrative and set up the bad relationship of the parents, instead of dragging on and on and requiring some kind of giant payoff I hadn’t planned on. I brought back a romance with a woman seeking asylum in the U.S. And gave another character a wedding. I even switched my narrator from one sibling to another. Suddenly the relationships really started to pop.

Maybe most importantly, I thought of cake. I meant the book to partly track a neighborhood “cake lady,” and the way making cakes for every family and neighborhood function allows her to see important moments in people’s lives. I had totally gotten away from that. So I thought of a dessert that would appear in every chapter to mark an occasion happening there, even briefly. That was great for keeping Mom in the picture and making scenes discrete in time.

Then I typed up a plot outline with a couple sentences about each chapter, including the cake image and the time of year that goes with it. Room to play around, but I could write straight from it without any new plot ideas if I had to.

I feel 500% better about where this is going. Next week I start moving around what I have into the new plot and writing the new pieces. The narrator switch will require editing, but not so much that it’ll be a problem. I think this is going to work. Right now I’m going to go get a cooking magazine so I can finish my novel collage/treasure map that I’ve been cutting stuff for.