Monday, March 8, 2010

I love it when things work out

First off, thanks to everyone who gave me such great comments on Friday, I love the writerly blogging community. Everyone is so supportive, it just grows my little grinch heart.

Second of all, due to your encouragement and the mensa-level quality of my genius, I've come up with the middle of my story! Is that worthy of an entire blog post? Probably not. But will it be an entire blog post because I said so? I think we all know that answer.

"JEM, what's the secret to your success?" you ask. Well, gentle readers, I'll tell you: the current WIP is book one of an intended three book series (a la Hunger Games if I haven't fangirl squealed enough), and in examining the long arc of the storyline I realized I could shuffle some information gathering around without damaging the overall trajectory of the story. It also helps set up the impetus for the movement in the next two stories AND gives my characters a reason to do stuff. So, I mean, once I actually stopped being drunk long enough to think about it, the change made perfect sense.

My lesson from all of this: if you're feeling a lag in your story, bump the major plot milestones up and see where it takes you. Otherwise you're most likely adding fluff filler, and that only works for duvets.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yay for getting your middle story worked out!! I love your last line "Otherwise you're most likely adding fluff filler, and that only works for duvets." excellent way to think about it!

Laurel Garver said...

That's an excellent discovery. In my rejiggering my muddled middle, I'm trying something similar. I realized I saved too much of the best plot material till the very end and end up rushing it, so I'm working in some of those incidents--especially the revealing of information--earlier in the book. I can't believe how much better paced the middle is becoming. Indeed fluff is for duvets!

lisa and laura said...

Here's to getting it all figured out. There's nothing worse (well, while writing anyways) than having your brain hurt because something's not working.

And I smiled at the duvet comment. Nice.

lisa and laura said...

Congrats on working the story out! More conflict always helps!