London, Sydney, or Tokyo?
As we stood by this directional sign on a small island in the middle of the South Pacific, my husband and I chose Sydney by way of Noumea since we were sailing. But we didn’t wait until we were in Apia, the capital of Samoa, to decide on our final destination. We had spent months planning this voyage across the South Pacific before we ever left San Diego, and so, even though our plans were of the type that welcomes deviation, we knew we would generally head in a southwesterly direction and that we expected to wind up in Australia.
This is how I like to write fiction. No matter what sparks my interest in writing a story or where on the plotline that spark might land, I find a beginning point from which to spin the tale and know, usually before I begin writing it, just how the story will end. In fact, I find that knowing the ending before writing the story is even more important than knowing the beginning. You can always go back and find, or add, the beginning, but it’s difficult to write a story if you don’t know where it’s going.
When my husband and I decided to buy a boat and sail across the Pacific, we didn’t know whether we would be starting the voyage from California, Mexico, or perhaps Panama, but we knew what ocean (Pacific) we wanted to cross and where (Australia) we wanted to end the journey. This meant that we would want to begin the trip from the west coast of Southern California, Mexico, or Central America and that we could plan what islands we might want to visit as we traveled, no matter the specific location of our jumping-off point.
The middle of the journey would work itself out, with many variations possible within the general geographic area through which we would be sailing because all those possible way points lay between our starting point and our final destination. Our plans for the middle of the trip could be determined or revised at will as long as we didn’t veer too far off the route to Australia. In other words, we would probably need to stop in Fiji, but whether to sail into Vanuatu was entirely up to us, the wind, and the weather. Vanuatu could be considered a minor plot point, one we could easily do without, whereas Fiji was an important one for the story. And Sydney, of course, would be the climax.
Think of it this way: you can fiddle with the middle, but it’s hard to bend the end.
Japan is a fascinating country, but one would hardly consider it en route from San Diego to Sydney. If your final destination for this journey is Australia, then save Japan for another voyage. You can always write another book.