I've had characters and plots whirl through my head, popping up at odd times, but this is the first time a novel has bothered me even in my sleep. I dream the thing. I can't escape it. I have other novels I want and need to write, but this one will not leave me alone.
So guess which WIP is front and center in my life? Yes, you're correct -- the new one, the insistent one, the one in a genre I've never written. I'm now writing a thriller, maybe not as edgy as one by Jordan Dane, but still a thriller.
On paper and the computer I only have ten pages, but in my head, in my poor aching head, I have the whole plot and characters and subplots. Yes, subplots, lots and lots of subplots, well, a few more than I usually use.
As I usually do for my characters, I have each one's description including likes and dislikes, physical description, and personality and character traits on a file card. At least I can now be sure I haven't named two the same.
This work needs some research, and I've done most of that. I know that the large sliding doors on each side of a helicopter don't have a particular name: They are called sliding doors. Oh, the time I spent discovering that. I know that the east front of the U.S. Capitol Building does not have any building directly facing it, only some off to the side. The mall stretches directly east. All information which I didn't personally care to know.
I have a title, which one of the characters insisted I use: Maelstrom. Now, one of the main characters demands to know why I'm wasting time writing this blog post when I should be writing the next ten to twenty pages, at least that many today.
Sometimes, we as writers become victims of a story that MUST be written.
5 comments:
Vivian, I feel for you. Good luck getting the book out of your head and onto the page.
Exactly... get back to work on that novel. The characters are jumping up and down waiting to be defined.
You know, this happens to illustrators too. We keep dreaming our characters and seeing those of other authors coming to life in our brains, but getting them all down on paper the way they want to be shown is frustrating and exciting at the same time.
I'm trying. I'm trying. *laugh*
Yes, Ginger, exactly -- frustrating and exciting.
Good post and so true. Stories won't let us rest, and characters have a way of taking over (which caused me a bunch of rewrites in the suspense novel I'm cleaning up now).
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