Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Defining

When I was in graduate school, our professor got disgusted by the obtuse thinking of the class and handed out a little vignette. It described a situation with a number of tangents, a meandering central core and a host of unrelated matters and she asked..."I want you to read this carefully and define for me what the problem is." A half an hour later she collected our inputs and began to read them aloud. There were sixteen students and she read sixteen different definitions of the problem. With a sigh she concluded, "If you wonder why the world is so screwed up it's because nobody can ever agree what the problem is. We spend our lives scurrying about solving things that aren't even the problem to begin with. I had to deal with this issue when I came to writing.com. I knew that a writer has to write from an outline but I asked myself, "Self, how in the heck am I supposed to write an outline if I don't know what the story is?" To me this was a valid question and not having an answer I just started writing away and you know what happened? Thirty chapters later I had a convoluted manuscript that went nowhere. What I did have however was a story line and from that I could write an outline. I also had some much more interesting characters. The beauty of a chapter outline is that it takes the writer and the reader somewhere. You can break the story down into chapters and the chapters into scenes. The scenes can be proactive and reactive. And you can take your overworked bioprocessor and focus it on a manageable chunk and as you write those little chunks you are led to a conclusion and finally to the words "The End." I know I'm showing what an idiot I am, and dancing atop my ignorance. The most important thing I've learned here is getting my characters to talk and let them tell me the story. Once I know it I can write an outline and go from there. If reading books on writing made me an accomplished writer, I would be Earnest Hemingway. I read a lot of self help writing books. Recently I came across one called "Writing Fiction for Dummies". I recommend it. The path to good writing is convoluted indeed. Anything we can do to lessen the burden is worthwhile. Good luck, fair winds and let the naysayers, "Popo your Kun-ding-ey."