- Your outline is nearing 30 pages (single-spaced!) and you still feel no closer to knowing the heart of your story than you did before.
- That instead of making a nice orderly list with bullet points as you have here, you have almost entire scenes sketched out, bits of dialogue, asides into outer space, name-dropping like a banshee. This is an outline, not a draft of the novel. There is a difference.
- You have 50 ideas for new plot events and if you wrote all of them, you’d be writing the YA version of War and Peace.
- You realize you could do this forever—plan out novels in ever-widening circles but never write the novels, that planning is not writing and the longer you take to plan the less time you have to write.
- That it’s Wednesday and you were supposed to turn this in on Monday—simple as that.
distraction no.99 