I may have look just like this...
When one thing goes wrong, it seems like everything else falls apart along with it. I believe these are the moments when you really find out if your novel will do or die. You can either pick up the pieces and salvage it or the idea falls by the wayside and you shelf your most cherished scenes for future use. In my case, I was bound to fix it.
I didn't realize I had such a problem until these last few days while writing. I knew I was missing something for later books and it nagged at me but I kind of put it off, thinking that it would work itself out the more time went by--boy was I wrong and well sorta right. My original idea didn't pan out and shattered everything. If that main thing didn't happen then it would change so many other things that happened. It's like when you have a broken seam on your sweater and you pull it, thinking it is loose somewhere in there but you only find out you unravel half the shirt in the process. So tonight, I stressed over it with some amazing writer friends. I had my core idea and explained to them as much as I could, hoping that just talking about it would spark something inside of the hunk of junk I call my brain. This is how I usually brainstorm. I grab the closest person, usually a friend and not a stranger in line with me buying coffee, and toss out ideas. I think of stories like puzzles. Once you have your main idea, only certain mini ideas will fit and sometimes it isn't the easiest of puzzle pieces to connect to--you know what ones I'm talking about.
Ya like these crazy freakin interlocking puzzles! UGH!
My friends let me rant and weed out ideas that didn't work, which alot of them didn't. In one instance, one of my good friends brought up something very interesting but not the whole idea would work in my case, so I took part of it and added my own flavor to it. It actually ended up working and will be sticking for now. Then it came for the big disaster I had to fix. Now having a new idea presented, I had to find a piece that locked into it, completing the whole thing. After many hours of spinning over it in my head and blabbing about it on skype--which I'm sure they could do without hearing me ramble for the next few months--an outcome appeared. It was like uncovering a fossil. Once I dusted off part of the idea, more seemed to follow, ending in an even better story than I could have had with the first one. It is funny how things work like that sometimes.
Are there certain ways you like to brainstorm? Do you use note cards? Take walks? Use voice recorders? I would love to hear!!!
PS sorry for last week. My parents are in the stone age and only have dial up but I love home more than anywhere else--even though I am happy to get back to civilization haha
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