Today I've been doing some more detailed outlining because I have some seriously big gaps in the plot at the moment. All the parts which are important to the story are planned, but there are some gaps in between these. For example: how does he get from here to there? how does this problem get resolved? how does he discover this really important thing?
For some extra inspiration, I've been re-reading the 'Conclusion' of Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance. If you have any interest in the way the aesthetes thought about beauty and art, then you should definitely read this. It is very wordy, with long descriptions of things which can get tedious. BUT it contains some real gems which give me an insight into how the decadents wanted people to view the world. It is the book which inspired Oscar Wilde while he was at university, and has given me a lot of inspiration too. I wouldn't suggest you read it from cover to cover, but the Conclusion especially reads like a handbook to decadence.
The most important message, I feel, of the 'Conclusion', is that we need to savour every experience. Pater uses the extended metaphor of a fire to describe moments of our lives, saying that we need to view our experiences as impressions which are 'unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them'. I wonder if it is possible to appreciate each moment of our lives in such a way, and allow ourselves to hold on to moments so they are never extinguished?
I will ponder these, and more, questions as I continue outlining. I hope that soon, things will start to fall into place and I will actually start writing!
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