Words/Time:  1 hour working on the new outline of “The Seeger Book.”

I have been struggling hard with this outline. In my last post, I suggested that more character interviews might help, even though I had still come up short of how to fill out the middle of the book by the end of a long interview with Jonathan, the main character of the book. I thought about who might be good to interview, and decided to just start with the character who has the greatest antagonistic influence on the story.

My thinking was that even if the conversation came up flat and cliche, I could always give up and move on. It took me a full page of my half-size notebook to get past her annoyance at me even making her talk to me, but by the end of that page, I had already had my first niggle of a break-through. The next few lines came slowly as I began to realize that this idea could be exactly what I needed…and then began to question if what I was thinking was even possible. I started following that thread, and now…I’m sold!

After a couple of weeks (of days with actual writing work, not real time) of just having no clue what I was missing in a story that was  already in desperate need of an interesting middle and lead-up to the climax when I wrote it 3 1/2 years ago, this kind of eureka moment is just amazing! I’ve said it before, and I will never stop saying it–discovery is my absolute favorite thing about writing!

I didn’t write the last 2 days, so I’m a little behind for Camp NaNoWriMo. But I have a feeling it’ll be easier to get back to it now that I am excited about this story again. That doesn’t mean I won’t still skip days this month, because of the difficult and draining “end game” work I’m doing before I leave my job, but I doubt I’ll be dreading getting to the writing anymore for a while.