I've lived in this area for several years, and I've driven most of these roads hundreds of times. Once you leave the main route (dense with grocery stores and fast food and Costco), you drop out of the Seattle bedroom 'burbs and into unincorporated Western Washington. These wandering back roads lead past fields and farms and a few New Brutalist style stucco castles, around small lakes, and up and down hills. They're green and shaded and many of them are beautiful to drive.

A review of Google Maps a few days ago convinced me that I could turn down one side street, walk a mile or so, connect to a back road I'm familiar with for a few hundred yards, and turn back along another side street to wind up back on the road by my house. It looked like a nice walk.

With that plan in mind, I left the house and walked briskly up the hill.

The side street I chose ended abruptly. Did Google Maps think that street had been completed, or was I on the wrong one? I walked through a serpentine suburban cul de sac, and gave up that part of my plan. Instead, I walked to the top of the hill and turned left, past neighborhoods I know well. So far, it didn't feel like much of a walk; I decided to keep going past the developments with evocative names, past the middle school and the alpaca farm, and down to the flashing light. I'd driven that way too many times to count, and it wasn't far. At the light, I'd turn left and keep going until I ran into a road that led back to the hill I started on.

That's what I did. It was three miles, more or less, and it took me about an hour (what with exploring the wrong cul de sac first). And it taught me a few interesting things about roads and the people who use them.

The road you drive is not the road you walk.
What you see from your car is fundamentally different from what you experience walking. What looks like plenty of clearance from your car turns out to be a strip of summer weeds raked by blackberry thickets, on foot. The kind of country roads I walked beside as a girl have become commuting shortcuts that you need courage (and a good reason) to risk on foot today.

Sidewalks are for show.
Sidewalks disappear as soon as you're out of sight of the big subdivisions. The shoulder narrows to five inches of asphalt beyond the white line. I developed a new appreciation for the rare person who mows the ditch, since I had to walk there so often to avoid traffic. Luckily, the local snakes were smarter than I and stayed out of it.

A woman on foot is conspicuous.
We're anonymous in our cars, but on foot women become more publicly accessible. Over my hour's walk, I got one honk, a catcall, and a "Hola, Mami" (the best choice of the three for tossing out a car window, in my opinion). Apparently, a woman on foot, even an otherwise completely unremarkable woman, generates a time warp bubble. This is the only explanation I can come up with for why some drivers were transformed into extras from The Dukes of Hazzard as they passed me.

1. Don't trust my memory of Google Maps when a hour's walk is on the line.
2. Stick to the trails, or the well traveled sidewalks.
3. Wear hiking boots; suburbia's a jungle.

I recently listened to Robert J. Sawyer's Red Planet Blues as an audiobook. I was initially put off by the male reader's use of a breathy falsetto voice for all of the women characters, until I realized that this was perfectly in keeping with the style of the book. Noir detective Alex Lomax never meets a woman he doesn't first describe by the quality of her breasts. Indeed, his favorite waitress and semi-regular friend with benefits Diana serves drinks topless in a local watering hole. During the entire first part of the book (which was apparently originally a stand-alone novella), the only woman character with any agency turns out to be a man disguised in a female android body.

Frankly, I hated the book, but I stuck with it out of a dogged determination to outlast the vapidity of the female characters and the constant grating of an audiobook reader who couldn't do women's voices. Despite the book's flaws, I wanted to find out what happened in the end.

And by the end, I had an important moment of revelation. Alex Lomax was a jerk who thought of women as vapid interior decoration---Lomax, the character, not Sawyer, the author.

As readers, it can be hard to remember that the voice in our heads telling us the story is not always the author's, particularly when the main character is flawed in an unlikeable way.

As writers, it points out the challenges of writing characters that are in some ways unsympathetic. Should we only write characters that everyone will like, or use voices that aren't controversial, or only tell stories that are safe and inoffensive? Of course not. But I think we have to be aware that the voices we use will be mistakenly believed to be our own, even when they're not, and be prepared to absorb some criticism from readers who have not yet had the realization that I had about Alex Lomax.

I'm not at all a fan of formulaic plots, and I am hugely skeptical of promises to solve any problem with X Easy Steps, but I have to admit that I find the Seven Point System (attributed to Dan Wells but, I think, most clearly explained by Lisa Bouchard) incredibly useful.

Here are the notes I use, any time I realize that the idea in my head isn't a fully developed plot.

I use this structure to ask myself questions, to fill in the blanks about actions and motives I haven't thought of yet. It's not a shortcut, and I don't mean to suggest that plots are formulas. But this is a useful tool for me, to help me think about pacing and plot. Next time you're stuck with an idea that just won't go anywhere, or with a plot that races ahead of your character's motivation, give it a try and see if you find it helpful, too.