Enduring

I gotta say, I am SOOOO grateful for all the prep work suggested by the "First Novel" book I bought the other day because I nearly had a meltdown and almost gave up my current story entirely. Doubts kill creativity faster than a bullet to the brain. You can't write with it. You can't have it looming in the back of your mind or it weighs the story down. Best advice? Shove it out of the wagon and press on. Who cares what's been done or what anyone else thinks? No one knows the story exists but you. You're the one who ultimately decides if it lives or dies.

Yeah, I say that NOW, but what about the near meltdown?

You see, when you're in the middle of composing a first draft sometimes the characters and "logical" circumstances wrest the book from your grasp and the story evolves into something entirely new and fascinating....just not exactly what you had planned out.

I basically had a meltdown after three such scenes exploded from my finger tips and I was wondering if the current stage of progression my "child-to-adult" character would allow for this mini-climax I had planned and was so excited about.

Due to the nature of my story, my protagonist needed to have a catalyst to make her frightened out of her wits after spending the majority of the first part of the book in a slight panic/survival mode. She needed to be in a state where she felt that her life was honestly and immediately threatened by the terrifying people she's going to eventually come to understand and befriend. I have three problems.

1.) These people are turning out to be not so terrifying and obviously helpful. Problem: it is difficult to intentially make a character very stupid and self-centered without making her completely unlikable. And unfortunately she'd have to be to not notice their niceness. They're supposed to be strange, not brutal.

2.) Terrified protagonists are OK to heighten tension for a while. Problem: it eventually becomes old and you need to have a moment when she actually grows a spine and stands up for herself. Again, the problem is likability, you're supposed to like her, not be annoyed at her.

3.) Scenes typed are often the best and purest forms of the story. Problem: due to the newly spawned scenes "time" has passed too much and she has grown as a character in such a way that keeping the other people terrifying and making the crucial scene believable has become three times as difficult. I need to start the second driving engine sooner and I need this mini-climax to happen the way I'd plan it or it doesn't fit with the characters or the ending.

Now you see why I was having a melt down.

My solution? One of the "pre-game" tips was to write the individual scenes onto note cards whose order could be shifted quickly and easily. I simply had to remind myself that the chronological order wasn't necessarily set in stone and that making that mini-climax work (with some tweaking) wasn't completely impossible and, with some creative adjustments, it could still work and might come out more dramatically than plan if I get it just right. She could grow a spine for awhile, then have a sudden fear and reminding of her mortality and the fact that she really was playing with fire.

So it is that I find myself on Chapter 4 of Clarissa's journey into a Monster Academy where she must not only survive, but find the threat that haunts even the monsters themselves and deal with it before they all end up dead.