I don’t know what it is about the rain, but I love it. It doesn’t really make sense because I’m very active outside and rain usually stops me from doing most of the things I like to do outside, but I love a good storm. Even more so, I love writing on my back porch, under the steel roof during a good storm and this morning I got to do just that.
I haven’t been writing quite as much as I would like to recently but it’s been for the right reasons. And as I get used to the contract work I’m doing, and the kids and new grandkids get settled into their routines, I’m sure my writing time will increase. But even with the little time I’ve been allowing myself to write, I’ve been making great progress on My Life As Death. This morning I hit 30,000 words which is somewhere between 35% and 60% of where I expect it to end up. There’s a lot of discrepancy in what various people consider acceptable word count for novels but I like shorter books so I target 50,000-80,000 words, especially for a young adult book like this.
But even though the writing is going well, I thought I’d been hit with my first bout of writer’s block with this story just a couple days ago. I had a good writing session one day but when I sat down to continue the next day I realized the main character Nate had agreed to get together with one character (Shawna) but ended up doing something else with another (his best friend Weed). It was a silly mistake, so I decided to rewrite the scene having him get together with Shawna like he’d promised. Only, I struggled with that writing session. I had to work to get anything typed up and when I re-read what I wrote, it didn’t really seem to advance the story or any of the characters; It was just kind of a filler scene. I didn’t like it at all. The scene might have worked at a different point in the story, but not there.
The problem was that I knew exactly what the story needed (the scene with Weed) and I ‘d already written it, but only because I’d forgotten that Nate had made other plans. Then it dawned on me that since I’d forgotten Nate’s other plans so easily, he might have as well. I put the original scene back in, and had Nate realize too late that he’d forgotten his plans with Shawna. This took things in a whole different direction and compounded some already existing conflict between him and Shawna. So what I thought was writer’s block was just the story telling me to get out of the way because it knows what it’s doing.
So this morning, as I wrote in the rain, I got to continue on from that point in the story and I can honestly say that I didn’t see anything that I wrote coming. And because the story keeps surprising me and keeps drawing me further in, I hope it’ll do the same to you when you finally get to read it.
Keyboard Monkeys 