This may be useful or not. I'm not sure it's what you're looking for or if it's more or less what you're doing, but it's what I do. I've had the exact same problem as you, but mine's been going on seven years at last count, and If I can't get the fucker out of my head at some point soon, I may need to put a gun to it instead.
Some of this was written before properly re-reading what you wrote here. So it may sound like I think you're going about it in a way you're not.
The problem I've always had is with the middle. Endings and beginnings always come to me at the same time and are generally always completely codependent (actually, I usually get my endings first, and the beginnings grow out of that very quickly after), so I've never had trouble with them, it's in figuring out how they stitch together and get echoed and mirrored and developed into one another that's the kicker. Here is where i've had to learn to scale myself right back, and hammer out a proper 20-page or so treatment. I can't stress enough how important I've found it.
I'm not sure how you're going about plotting, but a synopsis works much better for me, because while you're still writing in the exact same language of the story, you're doing it at a different level, taking the whole thing in instead of looking through a magnifying glass.
It's like looking at a painting in a gallery. If you're writing the whole thing then you're right up close, looking at all the detailed brushwork that makes up the legwork. Every sentence and paragraph that are placed with precision in order to make the thing read. But it's bloody difficult to see how they knit together to form the whole.
By writing a synopsis, you're taking a step back and looking at the composition, emotion and colour of the thing. What it is it's actually saying. These are the most important things to nail, because the grammar holding them together writes itself when these are properly positioned.
What you'll find if you do a summery, is that the whole thing seems ten times as manageable. The difficult sections are not nearly as long, You'll get to the root of what they're there for in half the time, and you'll reach that lovely, best stage of writing where the thing takes a life of it's own and ideas start cross-pollinating all across the work without having to worry about how you're going to get the ideas in the right places as quick as they come.
The thing that works best for me is to skip about, placing down all the bits I know are going to be there, no matter where they are and then start plugging the gaps in between with whatever comes into my head for there, good or bad. It's like keyframe animation. As long as I can get an idea, any idea into the middle of any large plot gap, it'll start branching out either side until it reaches either end.
I start by doing this treatment in word or final draft or whatever and then I break that down into the maths, the specific scenes, of the story in Omni Outliner. That works best for me.
I worked for a long time getting nowhere until I started doing this, and the whole thing is so much easier and enjoyable now that I am. Put the scaffold up first and then start laying the bricks. |
