Hello, writers. Hope I'm not boring you with talking about this draft I'm working on, but... well, it's writing.
Right now I'm about 27,000 words in. This worried me a little at first, because in the past I've tried to draft about 10k words a week (after all, this is a full-time job). And I've been drafting for nearly six weeks now.
I keep going over what I've got, again and again. At first it was because I had to make sure that I was tying in all of the dangling threads from the first two books. But now I've got a different problem.
It is now time, a third of a way through the novel, for my characters to make A Terrible Choice.
And it's essential to build to it adequately. If I build correctly, then readers will be right there with my characters, hating that they have to make the Terrible Choice, rooting for them, etc.
If I build incorrectly, then the readers will be aware of a writer saying “Whoops! Time for the Terrible Choice, characters! Come on, let's go!” And my characters will be picked up and dropped into chaos, not because a combination of choices and circumstances drove them there, but because the writer thought it'd be a good plot twist.
That'd be awful. We never want to see the puppeteer's hands.
So I'm going over and over it, trying to be mean to my characters, trying to build and build till their situation becomes untenable and unbearable... but it's still got to be their choice. I've colorcoded the different driving forces-- six of them-- to make sure that they're building a little bit more each time we revisit them. I've had to make one throughline bubble-gum pink, which is darned hard to read.
Gradually, as I recognize what each throughline is trying to build to, I can use more and more to feed it, so that descriptions and conversations and whatnot all, hopefully, help in the building.
Try this out for tonight's challenge.
Below is a rather wooden description. Rewrite the description as you would write if it the person observing/experiencing it-- the protagonist--was about to do one of the following:
- discover a murder victim
- confront his/her thoroughly frightening mentor, Froop, and demand an explanation
- greet his/her former fiancé/e, who is already forty minutes late
- be unexpectedly attacked by a squid
- all of the above
Here's the description requiring your master touch:
The building stood at the edge of town. It was on a street where every other building was deserted. The place was made of stone, and whitewashed, with only two small windows. A stone walkway led up to the place. The door was heavy. The room inside was large, dark, and redolent of incontinent bats.
The door made a lot of noise. Someone ought to have oiled it.
NB-- it's just the description that you're rewriting. The actual event that follows it isn't part of the challenge. (Though you can write it if you want, of course.)
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