How does it turn out?

By: Kristi Hartman

My Mother's Day celebration started out like most have in years past, with my sweet husband cooking me breakfast and bringing it to me in bed, the kids trailing behind him with big smiles and handwritten cards with pictures.  The kids climb onto the bed and stare at me while I eat my breakfast, their eyes pleading for me to share my strawberries or eggs. Or anything. 

After finishing my yummy breakfast with a sliver of guilt, we all get ready for church and have a pleasant time at our meetings.  The rest of the day is filled with a big family dinner of delicious salmon made by the husbands of the family, and a rich, ice-cold ice cream cake from Dairy Queen.  I get to sit and visit with family members while the men clean and do the dishes.  It is a great, thoughtful, and special day, where I feel loved, appreciated and spoiled. 

We got back home after our dinner, and started getting kids ready for bed.  After everyone was accounted for and tucked in, I opened my laptop to veg for a little bit and look online.  The internet wasn't working for some odd reason, and I mentioned it to my husband.  He went down to the basement where the router is kept (he works at home), and quickly realized why the router wasn't working.  The cords, along with everything else down there, were sitting in water.

Yep.  The basement flooded.

We were up until 1:30 in the morning, sloshing through 3 inches of water to rescue all our belongings and take them out to the garage.  

A flood/restoration service came that night, and helped us get all of the standing water out and placed about 6 fans down there to help dry things out.  

We are thankfully seeing things improve, and luckily didn't have anything really valuable that got wet.  

As you can assume, it's not quite how I pictured my Mother's Day turning out.  

But, as we all know, we can try to plan and hope things turn out a certain way, but sometimes life has different things in store for us.

As I was thinking about this funny turn of events, it made me think about my current WIP.  Sometimes I feel like I have a set direction for my story and how I want a particular scene to end, but other times I don't want to tie myself down by having a strict outline of what is supposed to be.  What if things change while I'm writing?  What if I think of something better?  Should I plan it all out only to have things change later?

I have been grateful for times when I just let things flow as I wrote, as that was when I found some real creative energy and put in things I didn't expect to do.  

Other times, though, I have wished for an outline of where to take the storyline for the next scene, and wanted something more structured to help the story move along.

Although I have gone back and forth about my strategy, I am still somewhere in the middle, having a rough outline and idea of what I want to do, but also write free form, and just let the ideas flow for creativities sake. 

How do you structure your WIP?  

Are you a structured outline person, or do you let things flow to see how it turns out?