I’ve discovered that weight loss and writing do not work well together; it’s difficult to concentrate on both at the same time. It might be because the brain uses sugar for fuel. However, I have been doing well with the weight loss.

I believe mentioned in the last post I had developed most of the chapter outline, particularly chapter 1. This is the part of the chapter outline I had developed for the first chapter:

Violet Cambridge is going through a scene with Fred McKay when she becomes upset at his condescending attitude and storms off the stage.

Fred likes Violet but finds her too simple since he comes from affluence and his comments cause problems.

Jack Dunkirk and Bruce MacMuir talk about previous play, Yeat's Deirdre.

However, in actually writing the chapter I found I needed to make a few changes. These changes helped the other scenes in the chapter tie together particularly with the first one.

The revised chapter outline for the first chapter is more like this:

Violet Cambridge is going through a scene with Fred McKay when she becomes upset at his condescending attitude and storms off the stage.

Fred and his brother talk about what happened.

Violet and Jenny talk about what happened.

Jack and Bruce talk.

Do you see how the following scenes work better in relation to the first one? (If you don’t, it’s probably because you’re just looking at the outline but trust me, they do.) And that's a common trait of the outline; the one you start can and often will change. An outline isn't a fixed rule but a guideline, and during the writing of the story it might need to be altered to allow for changes in the story.

I have started into the writing of the story but I’ve decided to put it aside for a while. I’ve been having trouble developing the story and it’s just not one of those stories that lends itself to fast writing. I could produce something in a couple months but it would not be up to my standard and probably come off as cheesy and corny (food references are not a result of dieting).

It’s a difficult decision to make, but I think it might be best to leave this while I work on other works. I have one that’s about two hundred pages long so far and I’d like to get back to it. I have been thinking about it lately while at the same time I’ve been having a hard time thinking about this story. This is not unusual for me; I tend to jump about between projects. Usually it happens when I get stuck on the story and since the only ideas I seem to have lately are for that other story I think it best to work on that one.

It’s quite common for many writers to have a list of unfinished projects. But I’m not abandoning this story, just putting it aside for a while. I’m likely to get back to it next year after I’ve given myself time to build the ideas. This is the first time I’ve tried writing a historical romance, and I’m not the best authority on either. One of the reasons a writer can write quickly is because they have a familiarity with that genre.

Based upon what I’ve written so far--particularly what I’ve written well--mine seems to be humorous paranormal (sort of like Ghostbusters, though with more of a fantasy leaning), and the story I’m getting back to falls heavily in that category. In fact, I’ve already had an idea to make this story more of a ghost story. The first paragraph even sets it up nicely for that possibility.

One difference between this new story and the other is that I started the other one without an outline. I’m now going to outline out the rest of the manuscript. With it I should be able to speed up and I would like to finish it before Christmas, especially before December.

One thing I will change the next time I start a book using outlines--and possibly one mistake I made--is that I’m going to develop many outlines and choose the one I like best before I try to turn one into a story. A lot of people don’t like the idea of spending time working on something that isn’t developed, but it’s better than wasting time on something that goes nowhere. One of the reasons the outline for this story took so long is that I needed to do a lot of research, but by sticking to a genre that I am familiar with I don’t need to spend as much time on research. But if I know what I’m talking about, then the story becomes a piece of cake. (Okay, that one was intended.)

Last time I posted the first paragraph of my outline:

Violet Cambridge is going through a scene with Fred McKay when she becomes upset at his condescending attitude and storms off the stage. Fred likes Violet but finds her too simple since he comes from affluence and his comments cause problems. Jenny Heart, another actress, follows her to comfort her. Jenny and Violet talk. Violet reveals that she comes from poverty and that she hates Fred’s haughtiness but finds him attractive.

To develop the chapter outline, I reformatted it and used it as the basis to start my chapter outline. But it was only a place to start.

For the chapter outline, I decided to divide the work into fourty chapters with three scenes each, giving me a total of one hundred and twenty scenes. I formatted it using a spreadsheet with two columns; one for the chapters and one for a line describing the scene.

Here is what I have for the three scenes of chapter 1:

Violet Cambridge is going through a scene with Fred McKay when she becomes upset at his condescending attitude and storms off the stage.

Fred likes Violet but finds her too simple since he comes from affluence and his comments cause problems.

Jack Dunkirk and Bruce MacMuir talk about previous play, Yeat's Deirdre.

However, even though my outline was about a thousand words long, I didn’t have enough lines to get one per scene. What’s more, is that some lines would refer to the same scene, so that when I reworked the outline I had into a chapter outline, I came up with about half short.

With this story I have a specific ending and a good place for a beginning, but I don’t have a lot of time between. For a story that isn’t based on any reality I could just add more material and come up with a new ending. But in this story I don’t have the flexibility. I need to work within defined boundaries. That means I needed more ideas, and that means I needed to do more research.

Unfortunately, after days of research I couldn’t find what I was looking for; specifically, stories about what it was like for an actor during production of a play. What I did find either came across as resumes, or it talked about the struggle of finding work rather than the experience of being in one. Though it wasn’t a total waste of time. It did give me some insight into theater productions.

I did come up with some ideas during the past week which might fill in the gap. I decided to add some storyline involving late pay, though I haven’t worked out exactly how yet. I also have within the story an after party for opening day. It currently is only one line in the outline but it could be expanded into a few chapters.

As it is now, I’ve spent more than a month trying to get the outline to a point where I’m comfortable with it, and I’m still not happy. Yet I feel I’ve spend more than enough time on it. For pretty much any other project I would be tempted to just put it aside and work on developing something else--and I have been coming up with ideas for other projects. In fact I think the next thing I work on won’t be as true to history as this one.

But I do have an outline and most of a chapter outline, and with more than a month of research I probably have more information than I realize, most likely enough for a novel. So after Labour Day I’m going to start into the writing. It should take me at least a month to get to the gap and by then I’ll likely have ideas generated by what I have written to fill it in.