I breached the 20k-word mark on the current WIP, and everything was going fine, just fine, until things began to . . . happen.
No, it wasn’t the few days of fine weather that demanded a drive (or two) in Pepper, nor was it the completely frenetic week I had at work, where no sooner had I gotten a handle on Task 1 than management pulled me off and told me to work on Task 2 (I’m currently on Task 4, which is not only a black box I have to crack open and suss out, but it’s also on fire and has a digital readout that keeps counting down toward zero).
Nope. None of that was the problem.
Despite the week’s distractions, the writing was going well. I was cruising through Chapter Three (the first long chapter of the book), enjoying the scenery as I switched between the current and historical timelines, reminding myself at every turn that hey, it doesn’t have to be beautiful prose right now, that this is just the raw material.
And then the characters woke up.
Bloody hell.
So there I am, pen in hand, writing, weaving subtext and subplots into the mainline to form a tapestry that will pull the reader along, expanding the characters from the modern story, feeling very comfortable with them now, until I switch tracks and head off toward the historical storyline, giving those characters a chance to come into full focus, when I feel a judder along the rails and everything in the outline starts to shake. There’s a shriek and a crash and smoke and heat and a splitting pain through my eyes and when I look up people are dead and backstories are changed and ancillary characters who were there simply aren’t there anymore and I look at my historical characters for an explanation and they’re all “What?” like they had nothing to do with this upheaval, but I know oh I know that they did it, that they were behind it all. Why? I don’t know why. It’s not like they’re talking to me anymore. They’re just acting—acting out, acting up—and turning my finely laid plans into a corned-beef hash.
My reaction? I panicked. I used harsh language. And then I picked up my pen, determined to write my way out of this untenable situation, to get us all back on track, except with the very next sentence I wrote I hit a snag, a historical detail of which I wasn’t sure, and I made a crucial error and reached for a research book.
And all was lost.
Not forever. Not even for that long, if I’m honest, as I was back at it this morning, but for the better part of twenty-four hours I was sure I’d have to rethink everything and redo major sections of the outline and reacquaint myself with the research I did a few months ago. Yes, it was bad. It was that bad.
But I reasserted myself. I picked up once more my mantra of “All first drafts are crap,” and, looking at the situation with an honest eye, realized that it’s actually a fair bit better this way. It was too neat, before, too clean, and all too convenient the way I’d structured their personal histories. Now, they have their own drama from which to springboard onto the pages.
I purposefully avoided overkill on this outline. Rather than my usual twenty pages or so, this one is much lighter, much higher level. It’s bare bones but it felt solid nonetheless, and it still is. Yes, it’s been knocked around a bit, and we have a few structural changes to iron out in rewrite, but I think it might even be stronger now, for having settled a bit after the rebellion. Whether this shift was a result of that lighter hand, or was simply the inevitable outcome of undiscovered flaws, I cannot say.
Though I lost some momentum, this wasn’t a setback. It was a course correction.
And I’m fine with that.
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[…] in the back of my mind, waiting to be used in a larger context. Regular readers might remember a bit of a kerfuffle when the characters in the book began to assert themselves, and the story I’d intended to […]
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