Back to life, back to reality

[Rosemary Harris]

..or back to fiction, I guess. I've picked up my story after not writing for about 2 weeks (although i did work on the outline on the ferry from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar. Wish I'd gotten a picture of that..hundreds of travellers exhausted by the heat and the rocking of the boat, wrapped in kangas, and I'm there sharpening my little pencils..) A bit of research has shown me that I'm going down the wrong (inaccurate) track on a major story line,and I'm trying not to be despondent about it. Still....it's fiction for pete's sake. How much do the rest of you feel obliged to stick to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but...? My series is set in a fictional town in CT.

[Peg Herring]

Your trip sounds great. Africa was on my list of places to go when my daughter lived in Jo-burg, but she didn't stay long enough!

I recently heard Bernard Cornwell speak about going the wrong way in a manuscript. He considers it no waste of time, but merely a way to see how the story can get where it's going in a better way. I much prefer going in a wrong direction to writing to an outline.