The Extended Forecast

Well, we’re about 50,000 words into the new project now, and we’re humming right along. This first draft is going to be enormous!

Our rapid progress is aided by a thorough outline, and by the stubs Jen makes from it. The giant tangled ball of barbed wire that was the timeline has been straightened and smoothed, and we now have a stockpile of about 20 stubs. That will translate into 20 or so scenes.

Now that the roughest part is behind her, Jen is tempted to steam ahead and make stubs for the rest of the novel. It’s a temptation she’s going to resist though, because a novel in progress is a living, breathing thing, prone to wanting to do things its own way. When it has two authors, that tendency is even greater.

In much the same way that a weather forecast isn’t terribly reliable more than a few days in advance, our stubs lose their relevancy if we make them too soon. Small changes accumulate as the stubs are turned into prose, and that accumulation can lead to the necessity to course-correct. Or to decide to go in another direction. A character’s motivations and personality become clearer as they are written, and actions that made sense in the abstract no longer do when the ink hits the paper.

Jen has already been forced to update some of the stubs that led into the giant ball of barbed wire, and she would rather not have to repeat the process. The second half of the book will wait patiently for us to work our way through the current stub inventory, and if we drift too far off course, we’ll talk together about how to get back on track.

We have a long car trip coming up, so that will be a great time to hash it all out.