Ha HA!
Did you hear that? It’s the sound of my long-stalled rewrite getting unstuck.
I have this issue with beginnings. In the first chapter, I’m trying so hard to establish everything that I have to write it three or four (or seven or ten) times over before I get it right.
In the second chapter, I tend to stall out and lose tension. I can tell this is boring because the words flow like dried ketchup, and are about as attractive. Even I am bored. There’s too much sitting around, too much thinking, not enough character interaction. I’m well aware that locking my character in a closet by herself for hours is not interesting. But I haven’t figured out what else to do, so I just keep writing that closet.
In fact, I have spent several weeks not writing that closet.
But today I found what else to do besides the closet. That means this rewrite might actually get done sometime this century. If I can get through chapter three, and the inevitable awkward transition from story setup to full-swing action, which invariably needs to be cut to just swing all the way through.
By chapter four, we’ll be sailing smooth.



April 27th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I hope you can keep up the forward momentum!
I must have rewritten the opening of my first novel ten times until I finally deleted it just before submitting to agents, which was obviously the right solution. It’s just so hard to let go sometimes…
April 27th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Nice. I’ve never been able to chop off a beginning like that. My third or fourth chapters never make good beginnings, either. I always have to write something else to take it’s place. Sometimes several something elses, in fact.
April 28th, 2010 at 3:47 am
You’re right. At Sundance this year there was a film about a guy who was buried alive. The whole thing took place in the ground. It was supposed to be pretty good, too.
April 29th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
I wrote a short story about a guy in a closet with a girl dressed as a zombie at a Halloween party. But they weren’t trapped, and she wasn’t dressed as a zombie, she was a zombie
April 29th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
That sounds like fun.