Lately I've been thinking about my novel, Missing Since Tuesday a lot, and have found myself getting bogged down with ideas; so many ideas in fact, that I feel I'm lacking a clear direction and it's going to end up too full of observation and become boring.
Don't get me wrong, I have pages and pages of great writing (well, I think it's great and all the people who have read it think it's great...) and a head full almost to the brim of ideas, but it's just too much sometimes!
The main problem is that every time I go on a research mission, a new strand gets added to the story - I find out about an event I didn't know about like New Zealand's Centennial Exhibition at Rongotai in 1940 and I see my characters there socialising, talking about the war and such, and then the whole story ends up changing around it and I can't settle it for long enough to get past chapter six (I've written six chapters in order, but I do have about fifteen more that are scattered randomly and I'm not sure where they fit).
With so much history, so much information, it's hard to find a middle ground - to know when to draw the line and get to the point of the story.
So to all you writers out there reading my blog (thanks for reading!), what would your advice be? How do you draw the line on information and how do you settle on one direction for your story so the writing flows smoothly instead of changing all the time?
