Sometimes you just don't know what you're looking at.
A friend is in Paris for the month and graciously offered to let a struggling writer use her house as an escape from all things familial. Wow, what a difference it's making for my productivity. I've been spending the evenings there, hunkered over my laptop, warmed by my space heater, flipping through pages full of red ink and bad writing, trying to make some sense of the monster.
I've been moving along at such a cracking pace, in fact, that I'm rewriting the final showdown tonight. I hope to do it in one evening, leaving me the difficult wrap up to execute before I print the monster and go through the entire process again. Woo-hoo!!
But I was thinking of the above picture the other day when I was cruising along from one scene to the next and my main character completely surprised me. It turns out that at one point in his career on the SFPD, he fully intended to murder someone. This is my hero, remember. Yes, it was a very bad man for whom he lay in wait, ready to violate most of his high principles. But until I got to that scene, I had no idea it was this experience that has made him who he is in the rest of the story and explained why he has made certain choices. Several times in the writing classes and seminars I've attended I'v heard some very successful writer say the same thing happened to them, but this is the first time I have been so surprised by one of my own characters. You go along, thinking you're in control (sort of) and that you're making things happen according to your well-laid plans of plotting and character. Suddenly, wham! What you thought was clear is suddenly not, or vice versa.
One of, if not the theme of this novel, is the question of what decent people are supposed to do about evil. At what point does someone accept personal responsibility to deal with wrong doing if no one else is, or if that someone is the only one who can deal with it? Now I know why my character feels as he does about this question. And soon (I hope), so will you, lucky readers!
The photo is of my dog, Charlie, sticking his head out the truck window, btw.
3 comments:
Good to hear of your great progress..
hope you can get this finished soon.
(oh and glad you told us about the picture. I didn't want to have to start guessing.
Your dog, huh?
No really, Scott, I'm glad to see you have found new energy and opportunity to work on your book. I can't wait to get my personally autographed copy from a local bookstore. I hope that it wasn't your wife and child going to Paris without you...
No, the wife's friend. I spent Saturday night writing the final confrontation, 28 floors above California Street, and then finished the Epilogue. So this draft is done. Now I'm going back to the beginning and doing it all again.
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