My outline fell apart at page 80 and I had to trash 12k words

I plotted a whole mystery novel with index cards on my office wall in Portland. By week three the cards started slipping and landing in the wrong order. I ignored it, kept writing, and at page 80 the killer turned out to be a character who died in chapter two. I pulled every card down, renumbered them with a marker, and pinned them back up in a grid. That took 4 hours but it saved the story. Anyone else have a plotting system that betrayed them mid-draft?

1 comments

1 Comment

thompson.xena3d ago

Did your index cards at least have the scenes numbered on them? I had a friend who did the same thing with a murder mystery, and her cards were color coded by chapter. She thought that was enough, but then her cat knocked the whole board down one night. She tried to put them back in order by color, but two of the colors were basically the same shade of blue. She ended up writing a chapter where the detective found a clue that contradicted everything she had set up, and she had to delete about 8k words. It took her a whole weekend just to sort out which cards went where, and she swore off physical boards after that. Now she just uses a spreadsheet on her laptop, which is boring but at least it doesn't fall off a wall.