Sunday, May 03, 2009

Walking on Shifting Sands

Well, the last week has been marked by mounting frustration over the direction of "The Granite Strand." As I said before, I've got a lot of moving parts and they are not meshing together as neatly as I'd like. Most of the difficulty lies in me not having a clear idea of what the motivations are for two key characters. One is very key and I will have to come up with something and the other is not so key and I will have to decide if I want to keep him. Decisions, decisions.

On the other hand, the new Oth story has progressed solidly into the middle with a blast of action and I'm pretty sure I know how to slide into the ending. That's encouraging. Still haven't thought of what the Important Thing is so for now I'm still just typing [macguffin]. Something will come to me. It always does.

2 comments:

Keanan Brand said...

Motivations can be tricky critters -- they can turn on you, and your characters can start doing things for reasons you never expected.

But that can be a good thing.

I'm a month behind on the next episode for the s/f serial, but last weekend I scrapped half of what I had, went back to the point where the story still felt strong, and am re-writing from there.

This time around, the characters are acting like themselves. Don't know why I didn't just write it this way the first time!

Jeff Draper said...

Right. So many times you have a clear idea of how you want everything to unfold and then you sit back after a thousand words or so and say, "This is not what I wanted. How the heck did that happen?"