The muse can be a real pain in the butt.  When I am writing in the wrong direction I get slapped around pretty well.  I can’t write with flow, nothing is clear, and the story, well… if you spent some time in this section of the blog, you have to pretty much know it wasn’t going well.  A reader of mine commented that things seemed to have crawled to a bit of a stand still, was I busy with another story, was I working on the blog, was I avoiding the keyboard?  To be honest it was a bit of all of the above.  

When I am working on a story, novel or screenplay, it never leaves my head.  Sometimes it flows like butter, sometimes it is a tornado in my head, but it is always busy.  That has been the case with Intervention.  I couldn’t avoid knowing that there was something going wrong in the story, because I kept writing other parts of the story.  I recently just finished the back-story for Richard’s motivation for becoming the “man” he is at the beginning of the story.  That was my first clue; I didn’t have a place to put the words I was writing.  For me, what that always means is the structure of the story isn’t right.  Sure, one out of place section can sometimes just happen, but several of them in a row, means I have let the story get trapped in a bad structure spiral.

So, I took the hint, looked through my work and decided to restructure the ever so lovely time sequencing I had planned.  For me, make it more simple seems a good reboot.  So, all the fancy writer’s tricks got tossed, and I started over with some of the words I liked best.  

The upside is, this really should make the story flow faster and track with the screenplay a bit more directly, which makes the screenplay a better general outline, and I know I don’t have any strange sequence problems; all in all, a much easier way to go about giving you the story.  Perhaps I was trying to structure beyond my experience level, maybe I was being too flashy, and maybe I was just nuts.  Whatever the case, I am rebooting, putting the prior work on Intervention into digital mothballs, and starting over, let me know if it is an improvement.  The old work isn’t gone yet; it is just waiting for a better place to appear.

I would appreciate, that is you have an option as to this tactic, that you drop me a comment.  The story should start flowing very quickly.  If it doesn’t, I might have to reboot again.  Let me know.

Write on

Plot Dog