The thing about this book’s process being so different from any I’ve experienced or attempted before is that I can’t tell how fast I’m really going. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle wisecrack writes itself: If I can tell where the book is, I cannot know how fast it is moving. If the analogy were perfect, I’d have to conclude this novel is operating on the quantum level and my previous ones were on the Newtonian level — which, given their relative word counts, would follow.
Is all this nailing down of sequences and diagramming of story beats actually going to make the scene-level storytelling work go any faster? Or is all of this just spinning my wheels, and the actual laying down of sentences will take just as long as if I had done none of this preparation?
