I’ve talked before about the variable nature of writing work and productivity. It’s a sad fact of this job that it can be hard to tell whether a particular task will take you ten minutes, three hours, a week, a month, or a year.

Last night I had one of the most productive ten minutes of my writing career thus far!

I’ve been working away on book 3 for some time, and while I had a general idea of where I was going, I wasn’t entirely sure how the whole story was going to wrap up, and I had at least a dozen major problems to solve before I got there.

Last night, in the ten minutes between getting to bed and hearing my baby wake up (without FAIL, every night) the remaining part of the plot fell into my head. I just lay there, a little gobsmacked, as scenes unravelled in my head. I ran them past the various issues and loose threads I had, testing them, and they came up ‘clean’ each time.

I had solved, it seems, all of my book’s remaining plot issues, resolutions, characters needing closure, etc. All in ten minutes.

“Do you need a notebook?” my honey asked.

Me, faintly entranced by the final scene and the fates of almost every character hanging before me, waved him off. “I’ll remember this, believe me.”

“DO YOU NEED A NOTEBOOK?” he asked again, quite firmly.

“Yes, that would probably be a good idea.”

So now I’m in the rather lovely situation of knowing exactly what I have to write, between now and the end of the book. Of course, that is the actual hard work part, but it’s a relief to have a much firmer destination in mind. It’s also rather strange to finally have it pinned down in my head – who’s going to live, who’s going to die, and how the whole thing is going to fall messily around their heads. I think I might actually have all the answers.

Now of course I have no excuse not to write like the blazes – I don’t have to stop and wait for my ideas to catch up anymore! Onwards and upwards!

Tags: creature court, plotting, saturnalia, writing