Novel Gazing

Progress on the rewrite is moving along nicely. It’s slowed a little, given my post-vacation status, but it was bound to get stickier anyway. The first eight chapters were pretty well fine as written; they only required minor tweaking and a couple of new scenes to help re-establish the focus. Now that I’ve crossed the line into where I went astray, it’s taking more time and even more thought and still even more “effort to resist what’s already been written”.

What was written before was all good material. I had simply lost my direction. Many of the scenes will feature in the rewrite, but I’ve encountered an unforeseen curiosity: I view those scenes as written in stone. My mind is trying to place them “as is” in a new location, and gets frustrated when the pieces don’t click into their imagined place.

Two scenes are about to become one. I’ve laid the mental groundwork, envisioning the setting and committing the dialogue to memory so I can blast it out when I’m done with this post. I was still struggling yesterday morning, labouring under the misconception that they had to appear in the same chapter yet remain independent of each other because, let’s face it, each one is effing brilliant, when a little voice quietly suggested, “Why not merge them?”

Uh … DUH!

From that one small instance, I realized that my logic processor is trying to control my creative process. It wants me to believe that what’s written cannot be altered to accommodate a new format, a better format, may I add, which further supports my argument that the ego, the mind, the intellect, is so freaked out over losing control that it will sabotage its own success.

Well, get thee behind me, micro-manager, I’m onto your neurotic game. As soon as I realized that two good scenes could become one better scene, you could almost hear the whoosh! as my imagination took flight. Suddenly, I saw how one location could support a longer conversation and add a new element at the same time. That element will lead into yet another (new) scene to keep the plot on course and voila! Another chapter finis!