This was a hard writing week for me. Mainly a hard writing month since April. I had to restart again. Essentially I’ve lost a novel’s worth of words in a couple of months. My first daughter and I figured out that to get this done at the word count goal I have in mind before school ends, I need to write 5000 words a day. The best I can hope for is to write a few thousand on days like today and tomorrow where I have a lot going on and several thousand on the other days.
Part of the problem is still backstory. The other part is making the protagonist active at the beginning of the book. She’s always been active from the middle on. I had a teacher say she couldn’t put down the last 100 pages of my book. That was a great compliment. Except she and most people who have ever read it don’t like the beginning.
Something I’ve always had at the beginning of the story is a letter. When I talked to Julie this week, she waffled about the letter. At first she said to cut it, and then she said to keep it. And then she added, “But make it have a spell where it explodes if someone besides Gwen opens it to show how powerful Jarlath is.”
When I was trying to think of a new beginning for the story, I kept thinking about exploding messages. It’s no fun to have a message that could explode but doesn’t. It’s much more fun to have a message actually explode. Plus, then nobody has to read the stupid letter filled with backstory. It’s a mystery not only to the protagonist but to the reader. It starts the story with a definite bang.
I guess my point is to keep your ears open to new ideas about your story. I don’t think Julie intended me to explode the letter before anyone saw it, but she likes it this way. At last I have a beginning with action.
I wrote over 10,000 words this week. I wrote Saturday and Sunday, but I didn’t want to look to see how much because they were trashed. In my restart I’m 9900 words in.
I hope you had a better week in that you kept moving forward and didn’t have to restart.
