Home Straight

When I started on Belief (two years ago this month...) Henry made me write an outline for the whole book, so that I'd have some idea where I was going with it all. I don't naturally work from outlines, so while having a general map of where the story is going is somewhat helpful, I've found it doesn't really do much on the day-to-day level, since what happens next usually depends on what just happened and how it happened, and I can't anticipate how I will actually execute a planned scene enough to put it in an outline. So I've gotten in the habit, when I finish my drafting for the day, of outlining the next few scenes on a large post-it note and sticking them on the blank page, so that I'll have an idea of where I should take things when I sit down again. It's a new habit, and it's been working really well for this book, probably because I've had to put it down for weeks at a time to do other things and it's handy to know where I thought I was going when I last left off.

Outlining only as much of the story as I think I'll get around to writing the next time I write does have a drawback: it's felt, for the past six months, as though I will literally never finish this novel. Until about ten minutes ago, when I finished the morning's pages and picked up the post-its, and surprised myself by writing out what is going to happen to take the reader from where I left off to what the big picture outline says is supposed to be the end.

I'm just rolling with the assumption that there's no one alive that can read that.

So it looks like I'm almost done with the first draft of the major part of my thesis, which also happens to be the first draft of my third book. And the little voice in my head chirps up... I turn 27 next week - I wonder if I can get this finished by then?