I began a new novel recently and, while I’ve been contemplating the idea for a while, I’ve had trouble feeling the project is gaining traction. I am questioning whether the idea has sufficient coherence and gravitas, along with the legs for me to complete it. A novelist-friend kids me about being too dogged in exploring ideas that might best be abandoned. I tend to wrangle an idea to the bitter end, insisting on completion, even when I shouldn’t. She, by contrast, has begun and abandoned a couple of novels after feeling she’s written herself into a wall. I always encourage her to keep going and crash through that wall, but now I’m understanding her reluctance. Sometimes a novel idea stops speaking to you—you can no longer locate its essential juice. I may be writing that kind of novel now, and it might be wiser to stop.

I’ve written enough novels now to identify when one of my idle thoughts might be the launching pad for a new book. It is heralded by a tingle, a prickle, a euphoric pop. I feel as if I’m onto something. An aspect of the world has snagged my interest and it won’t let me go. It becomes a recurrent thought; it accrues weight; it morphs into an obsession. Often the idea is in the form of a what if; sometimes it’s a character. When I was writing plays, a few lines of overheard dialogue could launch me. I imagine, if I were a more visual person, a single powerful image could become the catalyst for a novel.

At some point I begin taking notes and the notes breed more ideas, which expand logarithmically. As soon as I begin writing sentences and scenes, well before I understand where the story is going and what it’s about, I become immersed and impatient for the characters to become as multi-dimensional and well-known to me as the people in my day-to-day life. Invariably more characters enter, known or unknown to the original characters, and they carry their own set of worldly problems. Soon I am juggling a number of storylines and a cast of characters often too large to render adequately within the limited pages of a novel. It is not unusual for the work to seem bulky and unsustainable.

At such a juncture I am often called upon to evaluate my novel’s inventory. Inventory is a catch-all term I first ran across in Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Tells A Story, a book that analyzes closely how he approached the writing of one of his stories (well worth a read for any writer). Inventory refers to all the “stuff” in a story that gives rise to story options. It might be the objects a character keeps in her car (or closet, or purse, or medicine chest), but it’s also all the characters and the places you have invented; it’s all the characters’ current problems along with their back stories. In other words, inventory is all the material a writer uses to invent a tale.

Occasionally I’ve found I have too little inventory to sustain a whole novel—or a short story. In those cases, I’ve borrowed a useful strategy from the writer Tony Early, who I met at a writers conference many years ago. He spoke about a concept I have shared with my students ever since: Every story needs “a thing” and “another thing.” It’s a nonsensical idea when you first hear it, so general as to be meaningless. But when you come to a story that feels a bit thin, it is often because there is only one thing going on—there is no second current in the story that allows for the frisson that creates rich subtext. The “other thing” might be another character, or another story line, or back story, anything that serves to deepen and illuminate the story on the surface. This idea has been very useful to me when augmenting a story that is short on inventory.

I more often have a problem with too much inventory. Then the job is one of subtraction. It’s tricky to know what to remove, and usually I don’t know right away. I often labor along trying to get my overburdened story to fly on the basis of dazzling sentences, when what is really needed is a good hard look at the big picture.

When I speak of the big picture, I’m talking about structure. Heidi Julavits, has bequeathed me another useful strategy for evaluating what might be corrected. She suggests that it’s good to think of your novel as a “vessel” with clear boundaries that act as guides about what to include and exclude. The vessel, for example, may dictate that a particular novel covers only a single day, or that it is told from the point of view of only one character, or two, or five, etc. Being clear about such restrictions—particularly those about time and place—has helped me on numerous occasions to tidy up a messy novel.

So what am I doing now about this maybe/maybe-not novel? How do its elements of inventory speak to one another? Are there connections between and among them? Do they illuminate each other? Do I really need those long sections of certain characters’ back stories? Could a certain character and her storyline be eliminated altogether? Who and what belongs here, and what is the measuring stick for deciding that? These questions bear down every time I face the page. I’ve recently cut a major element of inventory, which has been a huge relief. Its connection to the other material was feeling too forced, and the greater simplicity has helped me to see a little more clearly what the novel might be about.

The second thing I’ve been doing feels to me even more important. I’m writing, out of order, the parts of the story that interest me most. These are the places where heat resides, the places where I am beckoned by the explosive unknown. They aren’t the parts of the story I was most invested in first, but they have gained importance during the writing process. In pursing these hot juicy sections, I’ve become excited again about the entire project. There isn’t a question as to whether I’ll forge on—of course I will! As I do, I’ll be listening to how the story parts are whispering between and among themselves, quietly beginning to echo one another.

In the end I think what propels a writer to the end of her novel and also helps the novel cohere is unquenchable passion for the work and following its heat.