Young Adult Chick-lit is usually hit or miss with me. I either love it or toss it aside after just a few pages. Because of that, I never really saw myself writing it. However, a few months ago, I’d been reading some I loved and I got my own idea for not just a book, but a cool series. I let the idea roll around in the corners of my imagination and after a while, I began to think things out more concretely. I created a world, and came up with a character I loved. It all seemed destined to happen. However, in the past, I have tended to write in a bit of a free-form and I was a little worried about approaching this that way because, well, it seemed sort of foreign to me and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to stay on track. I usually have an inciting incident and the ending in mind, and some strong characters who want me to tell their story, and that was sort of true this time, but I decided to try my hand at outlining. Especially since series are often sold on one book and then an outline for a couple more. I hunted around on the internet for directions on how to outline and most of them seemed pretty boring to me, but I came across the Snowflake Method. I really liked it!

For the last four weeks I have been trying to use this method without much success. I was going to give up on it yesterday, but decided to read the whole method through one more time. When I was finished I was convinced that it SHOULD work, but why wasn’t it? I decided to give it one more try. And then…

About half way through the instructions on how to do it, there is a bit where the guys says, “If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft.” And above my desk, I have a quote (okay, it’s a quote that I wrote, but it’s a good one) that I recently found when I was thumbing through old journals. I’d brought it from my old office. It says, “It’s funny how when things get complicated you try and try and try to make them work and yet the path of least resistance is almost always to let things go.”

I think what I’ve discovered from this outlining process is that I don’t necessarily have a book or a series here. I think it’s time to just walk away from this idea. I believe this because when I got the ideas for my other novels there was a sort of burning desire to write them. This book seemed like work…

I’m not sure where that leaves me as far as a next project, but I’m not really worried about it. When I told my husband he said that he’d been thinking that it was odd that I wanted to write a series like this as I didn’t seem as passionate about it as I was with my other projects. I think what’s nice is that a few years ago, I would’ve been bummed that I spent all this time and energy (at least six weeks) working on this, but now I don’t. Now I just see it as what it is…a moment of clarity.