by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Ok. Things are rocking now with this third draft of my first novel. I’ve finally, finally, figured out some pretty basic elements of the novel that I can work with going forward. I’ve swapped a gender and changed the ethnicity of one character, but now I am closing in on the end of the first act.
The Big Event that ends the first act is growing even bigger and more dramatic by the moment. Let’s just say there my heroine has a hell of a New Year’s Eve 1994. And that’s just the event that kick starts the her push into the “special world.”
I now have THREE MEN interested in my heroine for different reasons and one of them I have to flesh out so there’s a point to him even being in the story to begin with. He serves a purpose in the first act, but I’m at a loss as to what he does for the rest of the novel.
I have a few options. One of them is he shows up every once in a while to serve a specific purpose AND his appearance in the last scene would give the story a lot of symmetry. Which allegedly, is a form of good storytelling. But the key thing is I have to keep my eye focused on what genre this novel is. If I’m not careful, this thing is going to be more just general fiction than a mystery-thriller.
It’s not my nature to go dark in my writing and I’m not really all that interested in *showing* bad things happening to my characters, so, I dunno. I guess I’m going to have to be really thoughtful in giving a lot of pagetime to the results of bad things happening.
Or something.
The general premise of the story is really, really good. I’m very pleased. But, then, of course, that could be the delusion that has been a the core of all of this talking. There have been a number of times when I’ve winced at some mistake I made because I’m doing all of this in a creative vacuum.
I continue to be concerned that just as I’m about to query this novel, there will be a perfect storm involving AI and The Fourth Turning that makes all my hard work over the last few years very, very moot. But I’m well on my way to actually writing a novel — a real novel that I can at least be content that I’ve finished.
