Starting over from scratch…

There’s this thing I used to do sometimes while writing, where I would follow a character around and see what happened. Dishearteningly, sometimes nothing happened. Other times I would figure out what the heck I was trying to say or do and the story would take shape.
I think I’ve figured out what one of my problem child stories wants to be. The problem being, of course, that the characters and the structure have changed completely. I don’t know what that 10,000 word thing I sent through Critters was, but it wasn’t a story. Not structurally.
I have a four sentence outline that feels like a story now.
The thing is, I think it took me several revisions and 10,000 words to figure out what the hell this story wanted to be. I’ve got to figure out a way to speed up that process. I enjoyed following Chinequa Mark I around–for certain values of “enjoy”–but I’d really like to have a story sooner.
And now, I think it’s yoga time.