It should be easy, starting a novel. This one is due in September, so it has the advantage of having very little time to incubate. (I posted a quote by Leonard Bernstein recently in which he said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”)

I definitely don’t have much time, and until today, I didn’t have a plan either.

That’s because my usual way of starting a novel is to meander around with the character, as if I’m in a Polaroid picture that is slowly coming into focus. 

That’s what I’ve been doing. 

I know the main character, Cate. And her husband Grant. And I know what is going to happen to them. I know what Cate had for breakfast this morning and what she said to her daughter on the phone last night, and what she emailed to her son at college…and I know the unspeakable thing she did twenty-five years ago that she can’t forgive herself for, the thing that Grant won’t ever let her talk about.

Cate rides along with me all the time these days, a little companionly voice in my ear. If a song comes on the radio, she’ll say something like, “Oh, that song played the day that Grant and I got married. I listened to it on our way to the hotel, and it’s always reminded me of the way I suddenly looked over at Grant, frowning as he tried to sing along to the words, but he kept forgetting where he was and singing the same verse over and over again. That’s when I realized how distracted he always was, and it hit me what I had just signed on for. I looked at him closely and saw that the pants to his wedding suit were too short, his ankles stuck out…and he’d forgotten to shave on one side, and he was lost in his own little world, squinting one eye and then the other as if he were trying to decide if the whole world was all an optical illusion. I had always thought that the whole Grant shtick was just so adorable, the way he couldn’t be bothered to care about so many things. But now, at that moment, I remember there was this little chill, this one little nagging thought in my head: that this was going to be the thing about him that drove me absolutely insane. The way he was always solving math problems in his head, even on his wedding day.”

Sometimes Cate tells me so many things like this that I have to pull over in the car and write down what she’s saying. I have a whole little notebook now, filled with Cate’s opinions. And I have about twenty pages of the novel that contains her.

Meanwhile, September is like a speeding truck bearing down on us.

THE BOOK, I told her today, HAS TO BE WRITTEN.

And so I am going to try something new. I am going to simply sit down and outline the whole plot of this book, from beginning to end, the way I used to do with nonfiction books.

I am actually going to decide in advance what is going to happen, not just wander through the book waiting for the plot to settle on it like a nice blanket warm from the dryer.

There will be order. And chapter headings. Page numbers. Story arcs.

I have to admit that I am not a huge planning kind of gal. The truth is that I have lived a seat-of-the-pants kind of life, which has been my favorite way to live… but, well, now that it looks like writing fiction might actually become something of a career for me, perhaps I need to figure out a way to do it on my own terms, not just wait for characters to tell me stuff.

It’s going to be interesting. All you writers out there, please tell me if this is how you do it! Do you wait for inspiration, or do you outline and then stick to it? Which way causes the least amount of angst?

Maybe Leonard Bernstein really is on to something: a plan and not enough time. Key to getting anything done.