day 7: house-sized sinkholes in the road

Last night I was raving to myself about how much I loved my chapter in part five (is that weird? lol), the one I wrote about yesterday, and I actually wrote down in my journal that I loved it so much I would write my whole book around it if I had to. It’s a great chapter. It’s the crisis point for Lexi’s story arc. It’s scary and darkly comical and has some opportunities for gorgeous imagery and writing. I really love it, so much so that I would write the book around it if I had to. And I might have to actually hold myself to that.

That chapter, in part five, isn’t the problem, but something I discovered in part four that leads to it. This thing, in part four, is not just a roadblock, but a massive house-sized sinkhole in the pavement!!! It also happens to be the crisis point in Danny’s story arc, and is not really the kind of thing you can just slot into a story. Lexi’s crisis point already fit the story I had planned for her, and Danny’s doesn’t, really. It’s not far off course, but it’s different.

I keep doing this in my story, writing these hypothetical scenes, way ahead of where I’m presently writing. I think that means I started the story too early.

I can’t even believe how much my story has changed from where I first started, or since changing over to first person even. And I don’t know if the story is different because I’m digging into parts of my characters I couldn’t see before, or if they’re just different characters all together. My main characters, Danny and Lexi, are apparently capable of doing things I never thought they could do – dark things, shameful things, brave things. It’s becoming a whole different story, for real. It’s almost unrecognizable from where I started eight months ago. So much so that I don’t really feel confident I know what the story is about anymore.

I wonder, when does a story stop being so fragile that these earth-shattering scenes could make the whole thing flop? I want to find a story I can stick to and actually finish writing this thing. But there are unlimited number of ways I could write this story, infinite dimensions for these characters to live in. My God, how do people write novels??? It’s so hard!!!

Maybe actually having these two very defined crisis points will help me. Maybe I need to be writing around them, and now everything I write will have direction. All roads lead toward the sinkhole, or something?

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 6

10333 words (on track = 10000)