Or the ending to your story? I thought I could see it clearly. So clearly, that four chapters into The Jakarta Pandemic, I decided to write what I thought would be the last chapter, or final conflict of the story. What a waste of time. Well, I shouldn’t say a complete waste. I kept a few elements of the scene for the final draft, and writing in general is rarely a waste, but I took a two-week detour (yes, that’s how long a chapter used to take me…part time) from a solid writing stretch. I’m glad that a writing genie didn’t appear and laugh at my face as soon as I finished it. I would have been pissed.
Instead, it took me months to figure out that this chapter just wouldn’t fit into the story as written, which was fine. Though I remember being a little disappointed, and possibly angry when I took a look at the chapter’s word count. I learned a valuable lesson from this, and of course, probably reinforced a bad habit. Let me explain.
The good first:
1.) I’ll probably never jump ahead and write a complete scene or chapter again. I’ll still wake up in the middle of the night and take detailed notes about what I might write, but I won’t spend two weeks on a scenic detour again. For those of you who have read The Jakarta Pandemic, or anyone (it won’t spoil the story), I have attached the “detour” so you can see how differently things appeared to me in the beginning. Alternate ending
2.) Since this was my first writing endeavor, I experienced something that I had only read about in articles and books about writing craft. This sounds way more dramatic than it should…sorry. I got my first, good taste, of a story and characters taking on a life of their own. Now this may sound cheesy, but I arrived at a point where I could no longer force the characters or storyline exactly where I wanted to go. It was still going in the cardinal direction I had chosen, but the details were up for grabs. I no longer knew, with certainty, who would survive the pandemic? I didn’t know which neighbors would turn out to be allies or enemies. It was a great feeling. Not that I had been chained to a structured plot (far from it), but I finally understood what so many other writers have described. Like experiencing “runner’s high” for the first time, or the “green flash” seen at sunset over a calm, cloudless ocean.
As an aside, I spent two years on board one of our Navy’s finest warships and many, many days at sea…and I can bitterly report that I have never seen this mythical flash, though I’ve heard and read about it. I have even supposedly missed it while tending to more pressing matters on the bridge (in plain view of the horizon).
The bad:
This experience reinforced my innate disdain for using an existing, planned and structured approach to writing. I know it can help, to a certain degree (see, my own prejudice seeps through everywhere on the topic), but I couldn’t drag myself to do it for the first novel, and….you know the rest.
A good friend and writer has given me a few excellent resources, which I have reviewed, but when I sit down to start plotting or structuring…I get a few minutes into it before staring off into space. I inevitably open the “current novel” file and start to work on the new story instead. Admittedly, I do use a time line, lists of characters and abundant notes…but not much beyond that.
So, enough about me. What do you do as a writer? As a reader, what are your thoughts?