Yes.
A good long morning in the chair has seen me run through more than half of episode 6 in one setting, and for the first time I think it all flows really well. Perhaps one more day and the whole thing will be basically done. Perhaps.
The “final” enabling process to this successful resorting was taking time to draw out a flow chart that was a combination of a chronological time flow and a plot outline. Doing this exposed the exact place I was getting myself confused, thereby making it easier to figure out what I needed to do.
These things are interesting proofs of the things I think about work in general. There is an order to things, and set of steps by which work goes properly, and when you try to force a process without doing things in the right order (or sometimes with the right frame of mind), then they just don’t work out as you want them to. For example, I’m fairly sure I needed to fix the plotline problem I talked about last post before I was really able to make this view of the story work. In fact, there’s no question about this at all–the place of my confusion was directly tied to the fact that a vital scene of the story wasn’t in existence, so I had nothing to pivot the rest of the plotline around. Once that scene existed, it was so much easier to find this problem.
Ron’s law for today is that this fact applies to every kind of work in existence, though it’s perhaps more clear in a production oriented world like writing. But it’s a strong rule of thumb in the corporate world, too, or any other collaborative thing. If you’re at the office Monday morning and thinking about something that isn’t working well, my advice to you is to see what things your team is trying to do without some basic building block of support (and my prediction is that that missing building block is most likely created by a fact of human nature that a manager or leader someplace has either discounted or missed someplace).
Anyway. Great morning/afternoon writing. Special thanks to my beloved Lisa for selflessly doing the grocery shopping alone this morning so I could work.
My wife. I hope she’ll keep me.