Last week I talked about how much harder it is for me to work on full novels than it is to write short stories. As I was working on the second draft of my current novel today, I figured out, at least partially, where the trouble is coming from. It seems that my writing process is very different when I’m working on shorter pieces than full novels.

When I write a short story, I often have only a very vague idea in my head, or a line, or an image that I want to put into words. When I sit down and begin typing, I rarely have anything even remotely resembling a plot in mind, but that never worries me. I know that it will either come or it won’t. If it does, I’ll end up with a full draft of a story, if it doesn’t, I’ll chalk the experience up to practice.

When I work on novels, though, for some reason I seem to feel less comfortable with the vast question mark lying before me, and before I even begin, I try to map out the plot. This, I’ve realized, is a very bad idea. For me, anyway. This is just not the way I write.

My first attempt at a novel—the first one I actually finished and revised—was stilted and contrived; it was overwritten, overplotted, and thoroughly unoriginal. When I was writing the second novel I ever actually completed, my MFA thesis, I was able to sort of break free of these boundaries. I did map the plot out before the first draft, but when I wrote the second draft I threw it all out and started over from page one, with no clear idea of where it was going to go. I ended up, I feel, with a much better novel than I could have written if I had tried to plot it all out in advance.

On my current novel, though, I have a pretty clear idea of the overall plot in my head. This is partially because this is the second draft, and in the first draft I kind of hammered out all the kinks of what I want to happen in the story. But this is causing me problems when I sit down and actually write. What’s happening is that the pace of the novel is going all wonky. Because I know what’s going to happen next, and what’s going to happen after that, I’m racing through each scene, not taking my time and reveling in the details like I should.

If I don’t know what’s going to happen, see, the only way to find out is by writing it. I have to inch my way blindly through the story by spending a lot of time in the details of each scene. If I look closely enough, they’ll begin to form themselves into something meaningful, and the next key plot point of the story will reveal itself to me. If I already know the next key plot point, though, I tend to get antsy and move too quickly to it, ignoring those details and kind of deflating the entire story in the process.

For future novels, the resolution to this problem is obvious: stop trying to plot them out in advance. If I let my novels evolve organically instead of trying to mold them into something specific, I’m sure I’ll end up a better novelist. For my next novel, I’m going to make sure I begin without a plot in my mind. For my current one, though, the resolution is a bit trickier. I already know the plot of this story, and I like the plot. I think it’s good. I don’t know whether I should chuck it out the window to free up my more organic writing style. Maybe I should. Or maybe there’s some other way, some way I can keep the plot but force myself to revel in the details anyway. 

I’m a little over halfway through the novel right now. For the past few weeks, I’ve been going back through the first 150 pages to revise them as much as possible to enter them into the McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award at the end of the month. I’m trying to flesh out the scenes, making changes as necessary but also adding details all over the place. It’s much more forced than it would be if I had written the details in to begin with, and I’m not really sure whether it’s working.

Once I get through the beginning again, I’ll work on finishing this second draft, and my goal is to try to forget about the plot as I’m working on each individual scene; I only want to think about the plot when I finish with a scene or chapter and am again looking at how the pieces fit together as a whole. It may be difficult to force the plot out of my mind as I’m actually writing, though, so this is likely to be an ongoing learning experience for me. I’m nervous, but excited, to see how it goes.