Then a Miracle Occurs

Outlining is hard.

I’m jotting down some notes belatedly tonight on a book later in the Silver series–the sister helped me brainstorm it over the holidays, and I figured it’s been long enough for the ideas to have played survival of the fittest with my memory, and only the coolest ones have survived.

When I was a child my father had a shirt with the old cartoon–you’ve probably seen it before–where a professor points to one step in a student’s complicated mathematical proof on the blackboard as troublesome: “Then a Miracle Occurs.”

Tonight I am discovering all those steps in that future novel.

A little background: my outlining is not really outlining. My outlines mostly end up looking like this:

POV 1: Thing happens
Other thing
They argue about stuff–get idea to do third thing

POV 2: Get to other place
Thing
Notices stuff like x, y, z

So that lends itself quite unfortunately to points like “They escape” “They fight, she wins.” They escape!! Some…how. I’ll get back to you on that step.