I’ve been struggling through the early segments of Dreadnought 2*. When I was about eight thousand words in, and I realized that nothing had really happened in the story yet, and worse, I was writing a description of a glorified committee meeting. I got very sad. My outline, which had seemed such genius when I first knocked it together, now seemed like a horrible slumping mess.
But I keep going. It’s the beginning. I’m always horrid at beginnings. I always come back to change them. As long as I got the pieces I need established all in a row, I could come back and mix and match. If it was still a hopeless slog by word 20k, I’d step back and re-evaluate, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Even if it’s not fun, I just had to get it out there, get it down. You wanna be a writer, April? Stop whining and write. Take your medicine. Eat your vegetables.
And then, in the space of two or three sentences, everything changed. I can’t say what, since I’m still in drafting, but it’s one of those things that happens on the page that, in retrospect, I should have seen coming. It blew up what I had planned for the rest of the chapter, but in the best way. Immediately I could see a new path to the end of this segment of the story, and even better, this early bit stopped seeming like a chore I needed to get through and come back and rewrite later, and started looking an interesting scene all on its own. It’s dramatic, mysterious, it draws the reader in and immediately establishes the tone, stakes, and themes of the book.
In other words, I’m feeling like a fucking genius right now, and dashing out these quick words to brag about it before I turn and get back to drafting before the high is gone and I feel like an incompetent dilettante again.
*Working title, obviously.