Last week I realized that I had a really awful, intractable plot problem. I should have noticed a year ago, but for some reason (lack of innate talent, in all likelihood) I allowed myself to be satisfied with an utterly inadequate explanation for certain key events. In order for the plot of my series to work, a certain thing has to have happened in the prequel — and I finally tumbled to the fact that I had not the least idea how it could have happened.
It’s down to character motivation, basically. None of the characters who were on the scene at the time would have done the right things. Well, there was one character who might have the motivation, but he was an eight-year-old boy, and he didn’t have the means.
I wrote pages of notes. (I’m good at writing notes.) The solution was not appearing. I used my patented brainstorming method, without notable results.
In desperation, I thought to enlist the services of a story doctor. I contacted a couple of freelance editors that I found online and pitched them on the idea of doing a three- or four-hour brainstorming session. For pay. (And not cheap — we’re talking $100 an hour.) I was desperate! If I couldn’t solve the problem, my whole series of novels was going to collapse into a pile of matchsticks.
I wrote a 3,000-word description of the problem and sent it off to an editor. (A novelist in her own right, actually.) I asked her to have a look at it and then send me an invoice if she thought she wanted to tackle it.
While I was waiting for her invoice, a second editor responded. In readying the description of the problem to send to her, I thought of a solution to part of it. It was a four-part problem, actually, and I seemed to have an idea about how two of the parts might work.
A whole day went by. No invoice arrived from either editor. So tonight I sat down, started taking more notes — and I figured out how to do it. Problem solved! And I didn’t have to pay anybody a nickel.
One lesson here, I think, is that sometimes it takes the unconscious a few days to mull things over. Ideas, especially complex ideas, have their own timetable. If I had gotten hopelessly frustrated and started beating myself up, I wouldn’t necessarily have found any viable answers. Yes, I was frustrated — but I asked for help.
I also spent a couple of days thinking, okay, if this doesn’t work, I’ll just spend the rest of my life playing music. That will be fun. Either way, with or without a solution to the plot problem, I’ll go right on enjoying life. So I worked on a couple of pieces of music and didn’t slide into worry.
I don’t yet know whether my new story line will be a couple of new chapters in Book 1, or whether one of the characters who was on the scene during the events in the prequel will just tell my heroine how it all happened. Probably new chapters. It’s a good thing I’m not on a deadline, nor writing to a fixed word count.
Jim Aikin's Oblong Blob 