But I’m having a hell of a time with this latest WIP. I seem to be obsessed with writing the boring parts, and as Elmore Leonard says, don’t write the boring parts. I feel as if my entire writing life consists of the boring parts right now.

Figuring out where a story is going wrong is one of the hardest parts of a writer’s life. You’re too close to the story to really have a good idea where it’s going pear-shaped, but you’re also the one who knows it best, and oftentimes the only one who knows how far to back out of it and which new direction to push.

I think it comes back to my beginnings. I have to have a good beginning, or if not a completely good beginning, a decent starting point. If I don’t have that, I’m just farting around with characters. Right now, that’s exactly what I’m doing.  My heroine hasn’t yet found a point where she’s willing to give the hero a chance (or consider him to be more than something to be scraped off the bottom of a shoe), and my hero hasn’t yet given me the real reason he isn’t trying to get as far away from her as possible, as fast as possible.  I know it will come, somehow.  The Girls In The Basement will send up the material I need to figure it out.  It’s just a question of when and in what form it will be.

So here’s to hoping that this blog post will be the expunging of a particularly full-bodied whine and its associated cheese, thus clearing the way for some quality writing time in the near future.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.