I mentioned in a previous entry about The Process that the lack of a MacGuffin had stymied me in my development of my next story. I had the elements but no way of getting them all on the path that would, after some months of effort on my part, become a novel. I’m very thankful that my little authorial nightmare is over.
As I was in the Process, I developed several characters and settings. My main character happens to be a fourteen-and-a-half year-old teenaged girl. Now, I’m not a teenaged girl, nor have I ever been one, so I was experiencing some small difficulty in getting inside her head. What to do…what to do? After weeks of floundering about, I did the only sane thing I could: I asked a teenager of the female persuasion her opinion.
To be fair, I didn’t simply select some random teen. I asked Tess (not her real name), one of the members of my adopted/adoptive family. Since she is aspiring to be a published writer, I knew she’d be able to understand my little plotting problem. Lo and behold, inside of fifteen minutes she was able to give me the key to get the story moving. Oh sure, I still have major plot elements that are troublesome, but at least now they can be dealt with within the flow of the story.
Second only to knowing how a story ends, knowing how a story begins dictates everything else in the story. Now that I have both my beginning situation, as well as the ending scene, in my head, it’s only a matter of time and effort for the story to get writ. So, my great thanks to Tess for her help, and a caution for all of those writers who are floundering with their own plots—don’t stay inside your head, be willing to ask someone you trust to help give you a new perspective (if that person actually has some relation to your own particular story problem, so much the better, but it’s not a requirement).
