The halfway point officially ended yesterday and my word count should be at 25k. I am at 19k and took the day off.
I haven’t given up or bowing out. I needed a break. I also read a book (J. A. Jance’s Cruel Intent). I haven’t read anything since this started and found I was missing it. Furthermore, I needed to see that, at least on a sentence by sentence level, my writing isn’t that different from published works I admire by firmly established authors.
I found that while I still like the plot of my story, I hate that I am bogged down in uninteresting minutiae. In the stories I read, I like it when the author lets the reader see some of the day to day life of the character. How those characters went from point A to point B. I like the little details. The little details in my story mean very little though. I haven’t done enough character building, or exploration, to make those details meaningful.
The characters are in my head in shades of grey, some with more shading than others but all of them very blah. Very rarely through the course of this writing, a blush of color can be glimpsed. I am learning more about these people as I go. And so I will keep going into the unknown and see what is there.
When the story is finished, or rather when the draft is finished, I will get out my sketch pad and draw pictures of my characters. I will draw the map of the world. I will interview, prod, and receive letters from my characters. I will dig deep into their pasts and their dreams for the future. I will develop a history of the place and time. I will find out why people are in the places they are in and write up a few “A day in the life of . . .’s.”
I will break down the story as it is written into the tiniest of bricks. Bricks like my son’s legos. I will add the worldbuilding bricks and the character development bricks to the pile, and then rebuild. Carefully and neatly. When I am done, that second draft will be glorious. The first draft will be a very pale shadow of that elegance.
At least that’s the plan. I put that image before me so I can continue with the first draft. I am choosing the plot bricks now and discovering a few of the other kinds of bricks as I go.
I can do this.
