A little over a year ago, I spent the Christmas holiday with my wife Carole in Bend, Oregon, to ski the famous cross-country tracks of Mt Bachelor and environs, taste the famous microbrews of the Bend Ale Trail, and lay down some serious drafts, writing retreat style, for my novel.

Bend had a notoriously low snow year, so we accomplished only a little skiing. We did, however, collect some growlers from a handful of wonderful brewpubs.

And I spent hours staring at my laptop, completely blocked.

It wasn’t a problem of the words not flowing, though I’ve faced that at times, too. I simply couldn’t figure out the plot. I had an idea, summed up in a couple of sentences, but could not figure out the sequence of events that would tell the story. I had devised a few character sketches, I knew roughly who my protagonist was, knew a bit more about my antagonist, and had a wonderful concept for a contagonist impact character. I even had the broad strokes of how to bring the first act to a close, and what sort of crisis would precipitate the third act climax, though the details remained fuzzy.

I just had no idea for what should happen in between.

Carole had a perfect description for my state: analysis paralysis. I was so focused on getting every plot point just right that I was letting perfect become the enemy of the good. I sipped drafts from the collected brews of the Deschutes valley, but found no further inspiration there. And then Carole said something fateful.

“Why don’t you stop worrying about the plot and just write? It worked for you in NanoWrimo, so why not now?”

So I did just that, albeit not with this project. I set my unfinished plot outline aside, and simply began writing, without any plot worked out in advance, based upon a simple image I held in my mind, an image of alien ruins, signs of an advanced civilization, long abandoned. I saw space stations, falling apart in orbit around a darkened planet, and the arrival of human explorers to investigate.

The result of that stream of consciousness experiment is still unfolding, as The Silence of Ancient Light, and some of you have been reading along as I post my first draft scenes on these pages. That was another part of the experiment, to post scenes as I went, thus “forcing” myself to keep going.

I’ve made mistakes along the way. I’ve posted scenes, only to realize one or two scenes later that I got a technical detail wrong, some point of astrophysics or orbital mechanics that just wouldn’t work. I’ve thought of better ways to handle events for already posted scenes, and then struggled with whether to keep writing in a manner consistent with what’s already been posted, or to write as if the earlier scenes had been different. Of course, that would make the narrative confusing for anyone trying to read through, but it is a first draft, after all.

Perhaps worst of all, however, is that I’ve concluded I had my characters go down a path I didn’t want them to tread several scenes earlier, and I’ve written myself into a corner. Now what do I do? Do I keep writing the story as it has been unfolding, even though it isn’t really where I wanted it to go? Do I go back for a “do-over” and rewrite everything from that point forward? And if so, do I create a new fork in the thread of the story, leaving the originals as they are as signposts for my folly?

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve slowed down on my output for the draft, and this crisis of my own making is the major reason.

Along the way, I’ve had concepts and ideas for other novels come to mind, as they do, and even been tempted when the writing on Silence slowed down to break off and explore one of them. The writing community over on Twitter (great group!) was practically unanimous in their advice not to do that, to make notes on the concept, but keep going on the current draft, finish what I’ve started. And so I’ve been doing just that.

Yet a new conundrum has arisen.

Remember the original story idea, the one I was trying and failing to carefully plot during that winter retreat to the land of ales and trails a year ago? The one I put aside to work on Silence instead?

I think I’ve solved my plot blockage.

There is still a lot of work to do before I begin drafting the prose, but I have a very high-level outline for 60 scenes spread across 20 chapters (those numbers may and probably will change). With a few more days (or weeks, more likely) of work, I should have an outline detailed enough to be called a treatment, a plan for simply “writing down the bones,” scene by scene, chapter by chapter.

And this, after all, was my original project, which I set aside to work on Silence. So, should I now set aside Silence to return to it?

No, I don’t think so, and I don’t think you think so, either.

So how successful can I be, working on two projects at the same time? That depends. Silence was always intended to be a way to break the logjam, to spur creativity and to keep writing, to keep up the practice. If, along the way, it turned into something decent, that would be a bonus. I do think there’s something decent in there, even if it’s gone a little bit off the rails, so I’m nowhere near wanting to abandon it. It deserves better than that.

At the same time, I’m ready to breathe new life into my more “serious” project. (It has a working title, but I’m holding that in reserve for the moment; for now, we’ll call it Shadow.) Yet there is a difference in the stages of creation for Shadow vs Silence. I’m plotting Shadow, whereas I’m drafting Silence. Shadow has a careful structure to it; Silence is by design more free-form.

I can see myself going back and forth between the two. When I’m stuck with something in Shadow, I’ll return to stream of consciousness writing with Silence. When I write myself into another corner in Silence, I’ll wrap up the next subplot in Shadow.

I’m undecided whether I will post scene drafts from Shadow in the same way that I have for Silence. One negative side-effect of doing so has been finding myself writing for the effect of the next post, instead of writing for the effect of the narrative whole, thus giving the unfolding story a bit of a Perils of Pauline serial feel to it. When the work is complete, I don’t want the reader to feel as if she is reading a series of shorts; I want her to enjoy it holistically, to be unable to put it down until reaching the very end.

Nevertheless, I may still do so, but I make no promises. Meanwhile, though, you can still expect to see scenes from Silence appear in these pages.

Some of you likely have strong thoughts about this approach. Feel free to critique me in the comments! Seriously, I want to hear from you.

Until the next cliffhanger…

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