Lately, I’ve been begging my characters to talk to me so I can figure out the ending of the book I’m writing. Unfortunately, they have conflicting viewpoints. As a result, I end up with fewer words than I began with during each writing session. At one point, I thought the final two thousand words were in sight. Not now.
I’ve reached a point that the characters’ voices recently invaded one of my dreams. In the past, when this has happened, it was because my subconscious successfully continued working out the issue while I slept. Not this time.
Instead, I woke up understanding that the characters hadn’t been able to reach a resolution either. One pointed out a perfect paragraph that could easily tie things up, but the next one added words that successfully blended with the style of the paragraph, but took me in a completely different direction.
It reminded me of the time that members of this blog decided to write a story where we each wrote a chapter. The story had great characters, tension, and the plot moved. I couldn’t wait to add my chapter as I had conceived of a wonderful twist. The only problem was that the person who wrote the chapter ahead of me added his own twist by killing both characters I was going to spotlight and the plot line. In my mind, the piece never recovered.
I tried, as did the person who wrote the final chapter behind me, but neither of us ever felt we fully salvaged the story. What I did learn from that experience and my recent dream is that ideas can be blended, but sometimes instead of a smooth flow, one gets a mishmash.
Has this ever happened to you? Did you find a way to save your work in progress, or did it end up buried in a drawer?
I’m praying that my characters show me the way to end the book soon. The one thing I’m holding onto is that I wrote a short story several years ago for an open call. It was rejected. I kept rewriting, revising, and submitting the story because I thought it had merit, but it failed to find a home at least three more times. After the last rejection, I went to bed wrestling with this story and one of the characters, who had a wonderful final line of the story, came to me and basically said, “You idiot! My last line is great, but no one is going to believe, considering the career you gave me, that the action leading up to the line could happen.”
Instead of trying to be cute, as I had been, I listened to the character. I changed his career and his behavior, but I kept the last line. The story sold this week.
