Tuesday's Inspiration - Bird By Bird - Plot Treatment #MFRWauthor

I'm still delving in Anne Lamott's book for inspiration and just finished reading the segment on Plot Treatment. This brought to mind my first few efforts in writing novels. I certainly whipped through knowing I had the characters and the idea and knew where I wanted the book to go. That first draft turned into a lot of taking wrong turns and never quite reaching the end of the story. Then an editor sent me this word of advice. You have many elements to make a good story but you really need a road map to decide not where you're going but how you're going to get there.

The interesting thing was we were planning a trip and got one of those trip planners by AAA and suddenly I knew what I had to do. This plan for the three day drive was broken up into segments.

So later I set down to write what I called the chapter synopsis. I looked at this like my telling the story. There was littleor no show in the story. When I finished I had about 20 pages that had a lot of words written there but this was a plan of the story from beginning to end. I've used this plan ever since then and it certainly makes writing the books easier.

My advice is if you're having trouble figuring where your story is going or should go, try writing a chapter plan. You may not use all that's in those pages. You may have to tear it apart at some point in the story and change what goes in the chapters but doing this might just inspire you when you sit there and don't know where you're going. You may find a plan sends you speeding to the end.