Anyone who has been following my daily progress reports will be aware that a couple of weeks ago, I made the executive decision to insert several scenes between my beginning 80 pages or so and the section of relationship stuff I had written. The relationship stuff didn’t feel particularly well supported at the time, so Pot and I felt like I needed to go back and lay some more groundwork. I figured that would be maybe five scenes or so and I’d basically be able to run those scenes straight into where I left off, then go to the end and pick up. Well as of now, I’ve added 16k (approximately 52 pages) to the middle, and I’m still going! This insert is becoming the meat of the dreaded middle ground, where I normally stall out and get disgusted. It’s after that honeymoon period of the first hundred pages or so, when the faults appear, frequently along with writer’s block. That hasn’t been happening to me this go round. I’ve had a few isolated days here and there where I haven’t quite known what needed to happen next, but for the most part it’s been steady movement. And it’s been good stuff. It actually much better supports the stuff that’s going to come later in ways I hadn’t envisioned before. My characters are much more consistent and, I hope, believable in their thoughts, emotions, and actions. So the stuff I’m writing up to won’t seem so out of left field. Of course, now I have to change a whole lot of what I’m writing up to. The overall layout of events is the same, but how it unfolds isn’t. And I’m coming up on another possible roadblock where I need a character conflict and I can’t think of one. This whole hero spilling the beans about what happened ten years ago scene is changing a lot and the reason she ran before no longer holds. So I have to come up with some other reason for her to run–because she has to run…it leads to an important plot point. But I have to come up with a reason that makes SENSE. I have the hardest time coming up with h/h conflict in the first place. When I start out on a new book, I envision a hero and a heroine and how they match up. And then I get excited about them and want to put them together way too soon! But given how things have sort of rolled along on this, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe writing the beginning and more of the end stuff which puts them where I want them and going back to write the middle that gets them there isn’t such a bad way to work. Then I know what I’m working toward and I can better figure out how to make that work. Worth considering anyway.
