Romance Novel weblog by Carolyn Jewel

Writer's Diary

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

In Which Carolyn Writes Herself out of a Corner

69K words for Magellan's Witch. I almost gave up for the night about 45 minutes ago. I was fixing more stuff and getting my hero in those scenes he needed to be in and then I wrote myself into a corner. I'd moved a bunch of stuff around so I was only addressing a certain subject in one place instead of more than one, I consolidated characters etc, and then for a while things were a big awful mess. The choreography was all wrong and people were standing around awkwardly, either too close to or too far from wherever they needed to be, and the tension was going pfft and then, even worse, I realized that if I were my hero and heroine (which in a way I am) I'd just get the heck out of Dodge. And I tell you it's not a fun feeling when you realize you have all your key characters together in a scene that's supposed to be tense only there's no reason on earth to believe these people would ever be in the same room with each other without pulling knives. In my own immortal words, uh oh.

I just wanted to say Carolyn you hopeless hack, stop here for now and fix it tomorrow. In fact, I did say that.

But I kept going and fixed my staging and set problem and all of a sudden my antagonist was doing some really unexpected creepy stuff and it totally worked. He came up with the reason why they should even be in the same room, let alone talking and lying and establishing agendas and the like. Neat. And what a relief, I might add.

Labels: editing, Magellan's Witch, Pantsing