Overplotting

(Photo by Meomeo15, sourced from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license)

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on the bones of a science-fiction novelette, currently titled "Treatment." It's got a plot so good I'm almost stunned my brain was able to come up with it, and some characters and backstory that I think are really neat. I'm thinking that upon completion, I'll submit it to some sci-fi magazines. If they reject it, I'll self-publish it. I think it has the potential to be successful either way. I haven't yet started the actual writing, but the skeleton is, in my opinion, sturdy enough to support the meat.

However, because of one dangerous mistake I made during this foundation-laying, I almost destroyed all momentum I was having on this story. Just yesterday, I was in severe danger of becoming exhausted by my story before I had even started the hard part. This story, this incredible story that I felt desperately had to come into existence, was compromised in a way that scared me.

The culprit? Overplotting.

That sounds ridiculous, I know. How can you be too prepared for something? Construction workers aren't worried about being "too prepared" for the process of building major infrastructure. Politicians aren't worried about being "too prepared" for the work of serving their constituents (I'm not sure if they even worry about a baseline level of preparedness). But the fact is that being too prepared for writing my novel nearly broke me and brought me to the brink of shamefully abandoning the whole enterprise and moving on to the next shiny object.

Here's how it happened: I had been planning the novelette the entire time with one specific theme in mind. During this process, I discovered buried in this idea some secondary, equally compelling themes that I tried to push away to avoid overcomplicating things. Eventually, I decided that a particular one of these themes couldn't be ignored, and as such, I had to rethink my entire approach to this project.

As I redesigned characters and plot points and backstory to align with this new theme, I found that so many deeper things needed to be altered to fit together. I kept rewriting lore and second-guessing character motivations until I finally snapped and wrote "I AM SO TIRED OF TRYING TO SOLVE ALL OF THIS STORY'S PROBLEMS" in big letters. I looked at the line and a terrifying thought struck me: I hate having to write this story.

I put the notebook down and thought about it. Nothing really needed to be redone to support the new theme. Heck, a lot of what I was writing was backstory that wouldn't even be referenced, much less featured, in this novelette. I had brought myself to my knees with frustration by putting too much plot into my project. The best option, I realized, is to just take the frame that I have and let the novelette take shape inside of it. It's going to take time and revision, but that's just what writing is about. At some point, you have to acknowledge that your foundation is sturdy and start building.

I have left my notes alone since then. I am setting aside this novelette for a couple of days, and I've been working on a sci-fi flash fiction (that's maybe turning into a short story?) to keep myself sharp. It's very much a first draft, but it shows potential. In a couple days, I'll get going on the novelette. And we'll see how that goes.