Don’t think about the Ending
This past weekend I took my annual trip to Laurelville Mennonite Church Center for the Music and Worship Leaders’ Retreat. Last year I reported on my time there, telling you some about the wonderful singing, the inspiration, and the camaraderie. This year I won’t bore you with a repeat. Instead, I’ll tell you about a workshop I attended.
Ted Swartz, of Ted & Company, a fantastic Mennonite theater organization, led a two-hour workshop entitled, “On Using Scripture in Worship.” If you’re not a Bible-reader, don’t tune out. The thrust of the time was about taking the verses and coming up with a creative piece about them (the idea being that hearing Scripture read “as is” can be a painful — or simply boring — experience). We went through a whole process of hearing the passages read aloud, discovering what was “new” for us in that hearing, thinking about what was funny, where the conflict lay, and what characters — seen and unseen — were involved. It was a group brainstorming activity, and ended up with us doing a sketch for the worship session on Sunday morning.
A lot of the things Ted talked about hit me from a theater performance standpoint (in case you forget, I did have another career as a professional stage manager) but also from a writing standpoint. And the main thing he said that I need to internalize is to “not worry about the ending.”
As I’ve told you before, I am an outline writer, as a rule. I will work up a twenty to twenty-five page outline for each book I write. Most of the time this works well for me. Sometimes not so well. With the new juvenile fantasy book I’m writing I’ve been trying something new — the whole “writing into the mist” thing, where I don’t know exactly how the book is going to end, or even what’s going to happen in the next chapter. It’s been…well…a rather uncomfortable experience. BUT…it’s also been fun.
Ted says each scene should be presented as if it were the most important. That what’s happening at that moment is the most important part of the story. That the end should not be on your mind at all times. (At least that was how I interpreted it!) That idea, that “living in the moment” concept, is freeing.
If my protagonist is acting as he or she should, and the storyline continues, it’s okay if I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen at the end. I don’t have to have a detailed outline. After all, I wrote an outline for my last Stella book and had to change the villain’s motivation — and, in fact, the villain — because what I’d outlined didn’t work out as I’d planned. In fact, I got to the place where the killer was to be revealed, looked at it, and said, “You know, this really stinks.”
So thanks to Ted I will worry less about writing without a plan. And I’ll make today’s writing “the most important” of the book. Even if I am far from the ending.
**Currently reading Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke**
