Massive Smoosh Eureka

[thepencilneck]

I think it all started with the "message" of the story. In my story, I had a vampire as my hero and he was basically protecting his life (and the lives of other vampires) from a crazy magician who was trying to kill them all. The problem is that killing a bunch of vampires is a good thing, not a bad thing, and I was twisting myself into a pretzel trying to make the magician into a bad guy.

Besides that, after going through Holly's process, I knew for a fact I had too many characters and too many unrelated stories. I realized that when I split my original story into its two halves, that I hadn’t split it correctly. One of the plot objects that I was using in this story (The Teardrop) should have gone with the other story.

I decided to go into the Monastery and write out the outline of the story from scratch. I decided to keep only the basic events of the story. Basically ONE event, the event that I loved about this story. Nothing else was sacred.

And there was a massive implosion. As I started to write the outline, characters that had been separate and diametrically opposed smooshed together and became a new character with bits and pieces of the original characters. Story lines merged together or fell away. My main character became a secondary character. A secondary character and my villain merged and became my hero. A whole slew of vampires merged into a single bad-ass vampire who is now my villain. My city grew dark with winter and ice filled the bay shutting down sea travel out of the city. I suddenly felt like I was close to the story that I really wanted to write, a story I could really get excited about.

Right now, I’m still working on my scene list. Almost all of my scenes (over 85%) are totally new scenes. I’m looking to see if I can heighten any conflicts, add in some drama, add in some unintended consequences, and making sure that I’m resolving all my conflicts and not letting any of them drop. When I’m done with that, I’ll begin the write-in.

Hopefully, I’ll be back to writing words by the end of this week.

[Cat-Gerlach]

Congrats. This sounds like a major breakthrough.

[marti-v]

Wow, TPN! You're cookin' with gas now! (Yup. Showin' my age.)

[Kate]

What a breakthough! Even in summary, your story sounds stronger and more focused.

[Texanne]

This is scary wonderful!

I love that the process works so well--and I bow to you for being able to let go of old notions in favor of doing the story right, even when it means so much more work. Whatever characteristic that exemplifies, it's a great one. Go, TPN! TX

[annelyle]

Well done, TPN! Sounds like a solid (and rather spooky!) story you've got there!

That's a lot of rewrites, but you're not alone. Plenty of us are still slogging through Lesson 17 (the Write-In)

[prudencewombat]

That sounds awesome TPN!
Good luck with the write-in. We, and all our red cards, will be with you