Earlier this weekend, I had serious doubts about my story idea. Serious enough that I had started contemplating alternative genres and plots. I had looked at the scant notes that I had so far and thought, "How the heck am I going to fit all these elements together?" Because the way I had originally set it up, a lot of it wasn't going to make any sense.
Was I going to throw out the notes and start completely fresh? It was tempting, but I still wanted to figure out how I could salvage the story. And that's when it struck me--I should set the story in June rather than November. Then everything fell into place--why the characters had the urgency to solve a mystery, why the villain was doing what he/she was doing, why certain characters had to be present in the plot, why the main setting was what it was, how I was going to solve the story's main conflict, and thus, a concrete ending now exists that actually makes some sort of sense.
So why did just changing the setting of the story to a few months earlier make such a difference? A hint: The Battle of Waterloo was fought during June 1815. According to Wikipedia,"Napoleon delayed giving battle until noon on 18 June to allow the ground to dry." (Emphasis mine) Hear that? For some reason I had glossed over that bit of detail when I had read about it previously.
So apparently, soggy ground solves my plot problems!
