Spilling all the beans?  When to start talking about your WIP

I don’t know about you, but I have killed many a plot line by talking.  I don’t know what happens, or why, but I seem to lose the will to write it down after I have told the story.  For me, the story has to unfold on the page; it has to come out like it is something I haven’t heard before.  As if the story is being told and I am not the writer, but the listener.

So… if I spill the beans about an exciting new idea I have for a novel, I don’t end up writing it down.  Instead, it just comes out of my mouth and spills onto the floor and gets mopped up, absorbed back into the universe.  So I have learned a quiet patience about my work.

The first novel was an outright secret.  I didn’t tell anyone on purpose.  I didn’t even want to tell myself.  It was a surprise.  That was a good thing.  I never really did understand why it took me all these years to write a good story.  I was always the storyteller.  At sleepover parties when I was a little girl I could scare people right into calling their moms to pick them up.  As I grew older and told stories to colleagues in my academic circles they would inevitably say “You should write that down!” But I simply could not do it.  I couldn’t do it until it was a secret.

And after that I had SO many ideas!  Book ideas were everywhere I looked.  The old man in the grocery store became an aged, un-captured, sociopath who follows a mass murderer around and everyone thinks he is going to be a hero, but all he really wants is one last kill.  And then there was the story about the woman who was in a car crash and the Mexican man who mowed her condo complex lawn comes to her as she is dying in her car, only he is a ghost type of figure who leads her through her past and present and possible future (you know, a take of on Dickens, with a whiff of Stephen King) and let us not forget the story of Meg, the literary agent who needs to return to her small sea side city to help unravel the mystery of her sister’s death twenty years before.  All of these were well mapped out, plotted, stories.  They could have been decent books…. But I wrecked them!  I sat in my kitchen and told them out loud to any one who would listen to me.  And in doing so, made myself so bored when I sat down to write them, that they wouldn’t come out. Used up … washed up… already told stories.  Humph.

But we do, as writers, have to share…do we not?  It is important, especially with a WIP (work in progress for all of you out there new to the biz) to get a good, solid critique.  So what do we do about this?

I figured it out… at least for myself.  I have to keep quiet about the book and write.  I have to get the story out on paper.  The whole story.  The beginning the middle and the end.  And I have to map out the chapters in between.  For me, this means about 20k words.  It is then that I can safely begin to discuss my project without losing interest.  See, at this point it is already done.  The rest of it is an assignment.  For example in my current WIP The Junk Garden, I knew there had to be this crazy showdown in a motel parking lot.  I knew why it had to happen, and I knew the gist of it.  I knew what came before and what was to come after.  So even though it simply stated SHOWDOWN AT

THE STARDUST MOTEL, I could safely talk about the book knowing that I had to write that chapter soon.   (I just did, by the way, and I am really happy with it.)

How about you?  Do you ever ruin a story for yourself by spilling the beans too soon?  Or is it better for you to talk the whole thing out before you write?

Suzanne M. Palmieri

Suzanne is a Sociologist by profession and degree. She teaches Social Behavior and Social Interaction as well as many courses in Deviance at the university level.

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