Making friends with plot

Earlier this summer I took a plot workshop with Martha Alderson that was really useful. It had shown up in a SCBWI announcement email, and it seemed like something that could help out as I tried to figure out some children’s book stuff (since I love my character Lucy, I’m trying to see how I can stretch her into more books). But it turned out to pack all kinds of revelations about other projects I was working on, too. And it really was the key in moving forward on my other novel. Suddenly I understood whole new universes of information about Manzanita, the hapless wannabe academic I’m writing about. And it became totally clear how I needed to reshape the second half of her story.

Now, I hate to write from an outline. And I absolutely hate to look at the page count and from there consider which plot point I’m headed toward. To me that makes writing feel like screenwriter hell – and it gives me bad flashbacks of a time when I tied myself in knots after too much time spent with Robert McKee’s Story and one particularly recalcitrant manuscript. But the strange truth is that stepping back and looking at plot at the right time in the process has totally changed things for me.