On a Roll

It's curious how things happen. Since my last post, I continued working with my characters and wrote several skits for each.  Despite being pulled away by other work and family stuff, the characters began to gel in my mind.  About a week ago, I arrived at what I call my holy grail of writing. Character possession took over and the characters started writing themselves. Hello, Piper Feakes. Could you tell me why you said that? He always has a good answer.

All my characters, suffering though they were, began clamoring for my attention. In the corner, there is a heap of notes about events and interesting things for the characters to do within my novel. I wanted to get at the pile and start writing, but my protagonist was pleading for closure and I was a little vague on how he was going to get there.  I grabbed my writer's clay and threw it on my writing wheel to shape the last chapter of the book. Six thousand words in an afternoon! I had never done that before.

Both the antagonist and protagonist came alive in an epic battle of wits, internal anguish, triumph and defeat. The ending is tricky. Both the protagonist and antagonist win and lose their internal struggle, but wind up in a satisfying place. It's a little like the movie, "Enemy Mine."

As written, the ending is still not perfect, but it gave me tremendous insights into the journey they were both on.  Yes,  I know all that stuff was in my outline and notes, but now I get it.

I immediately turned to the middle of the book and wrote two chapters of high conflict that set up the moment of truth. This morning, I sat down to write the conflict prior to the middle and saw Jeanne's comment to my blog. She suggested I start in the middle, and offered a good book as a resource.  Thanks Jeanne, serendipity happens!

After I read the book Jeanne recommended, I'll know more, but I think the ideas are similar even though I chose to start at the end.

Where am I headed now? Not too sure, but my instinct is to take the major characters, stick with them and write them middle out.  This will pull in the minor characters, but not all of them. I have three subplots that weave through the story with characters that never directly interact with the major characters. Those are character-centric sub-plots, and I think I will write each character's plot line one at a time so I can stay with the character.

If all goes right, I will end up with a bunch of pieces to slice, dice, and stitch into the final novel.

Stay tuned.

Thanks Jeanne.