November 7, 2005

so much easier to plot someone else’s book than it is to plot your own?

Why can I sit down and listen to one of my writing buddies’ skeleton plots, or read a chapter, and suddenly, I can plot the whole thing out…work out interesting things and twists and unique happenings, but when it comes to my own, it’s like pulling teeth.

That’s probably why I’m affectionately known as a “pantser”–someone who writes by the seat o’the pants. Because if I had to figure out the whole darn plot, before I wrote, I’d never sit down to write.

Anyway, I have to thank my good buddy Jen, because today I sent her an email with a blathering list of some of the basic things that I thought would happen in my second book for NAL, none of these things even remotely connected, and she calls me up–from Korea, mind you–and has figured out a way to knit them together. Beautiful, simple, makes sense.

But is that enough for me? No, of course not. I throw in another piece of detail, and in two minutes, she’s got that woven in too.

Now, I’d like to think I’d have come up with a way to do it myself, if I’d given myself the time to do so…but it’s a bit disheartening when someone else, who has no ownership of the story, comes up with the line. You know?

And the truth is, I may or may not end up using all of the parts or details she suggested…in fact, I’m sure I won’t–but the value of what she did for me is that she gave me a direction to start in, kind of a shove off like you have someone do when you’re starting off in a canoe from shore…and that allows a pantser like me to actually put the fingers to the keyboard and write.

So, thanks Jen! I owe ya!

And….in other news, just in case you were curious, here’s what I ate today on my raw/living food diet:

• two glasses of green smoothie
• one half an avocado
• a salad
• a few scattered almonds throughout the day
• “raw spaghetti” (summer squash spiral-sliced into spaghetti-ish strands, covered with uncooked marinara sauce–almost like a salsa, but sweeter)
• another very small salad
• a s’more. Yeah.

Well, I was at the middle school youth group meeting at my church that I help to run, and we were having s’mores. I was the one making them–I must have made sixty, squishing toasty roasted marshmallows between graham crackers and chocolate. I would make them and hand them to the eager hands of the youth…and then I had one that no one wanted, in my marshmallow-sticky hands, and I couldn’t give it away, so I started eating it. I wasn’t even hungry. Sigh. Ah well. I feel sick now, but tomorrow is another day.

Right, Scarlett?