This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the four hundred, 15th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

One of the many reasons I love outlining my stories is that it makes the first draft so comparatively easy.

I do my best to answer any possible questions I may have about a story's logical progression before I ever start the first draft.

And this means I can usually blow through scenes fairly quickly.

I know where I'm going and what I'm trying to do and rarely trip myself up. But it still happens. People

often ask me, what do you do when your outline doesn't work.

Optimally, of course, you spend enough time and thought on your outline up front

do you make it work. But nothing's perfect. This week, I ran into a scene that based on the outline just wasn't working. I hadn't properly planned these scenes emotional arc. So even though all the proper scene structure was in place, it was just

coming across flat. The plot was being advanced, but the characters weren't. Their

mindsets and personal growth wasn't changing at all from the beginning to the end of the scene.

So I had to take a writing session this week and go back to basics on this scene. I pulled up my notebook, worked my way

through the problems, and figured out how to have what needed to happen happen

while making the scene much more interesting and more integral to the character's

arcs. So now it's back to actually writing the thing tomorrow morning.

And now I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast for possible reasons why we write.

It is the nature of writers to wonder.

We wonder about others and we wonder about ourselves.

We even wonder why we write.

For most of us, the compulsion to write is so enough.

Why do we write? We just the stories, we love the words. We are compelled to

communicate our wonder with the But that's not really it, is it?

The need to tell stories is universal, across time, across space.

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