Dec 12 2012

Has it happened to anyone else that you start writing one kind of book and it turns out to be something else? The core idea of my book was very clear in my mind before I began. I even bought a couple of non-fiction books, based on the idea, that I thought would be very helpful to me as research material. But now that the story has got going, I see that I am barely using the core idea. Will some part of it emerge in future chapters? Perhaps. But it is also very likely that the story will end up being very different from the one I envisaged before beginning the project. And the reason for that is that the core idea was not logical in the environment I placed my characters in and I just could not reconcile the two.

I think there may be another book in there, for another time.

Meanwhile, I am not getting anywhere with the writing today. I think I might have the first attack of writer’s block, after chugging away productively for a week. The biggest problem is that I haven’t really thought through what happens in the next chapter, so don’t know what to put down. Is it going to be a chapter on background? Is the present story going to move along? Is it okay to spend my writing hours thinking instead? Throw in an interrupted morning because of the teenager’s block schedule at school, and you have the recipe for unproductivity.

Sigh!