Sunday 14 October 2007

Crisis #1 (where the novel isn’t coming on as hoped)

I’ve arrived. At my first brick wall. And it’s a big one.

I’ve written just over 15,000 words out of the 35,000 I hope to end up with at the end of the first draft. But something isn’t right. No, scrap that, a lot isn’t right. The plot is naff, the setting is crappy and half the characters are annoying idiots.

I’m trying to look at it from all angles and so far I’ve decided that I’ve set it in the wrong place. I was being lazy and I used a suburb instead of a city, just because I didn’t want to do the extra research. Write what you know, they say, and I think I took that a little too literally.

I’m going to take this next week and have a serious think about my story in its current format. Radical change is needed so if I have to swallow 15,000 words then so be it.

However, I’m not going to hang myself by my ankles or jump from the top of a very large cardboard box, because those 15,000 words have given me something I didn’t have before. They gave me my main character. I see him. I hear him. I know what he smells like and what he wears. I know his likes and dislikes. I know how he reacts to his family and people he doesn’t know. I have a character that I can put into a thousand different scenarios and I know how he’ll behave. I love him like a son, and the best thing?

He’s all mine.

No comments: