I was plugging along on Space Heist working pretty much in order off an outline spreadsheet with the various storylines when I realized I was telling a pretty boring story. There was no umph, no emotional engagement because the core of the story, the source of the conflict was traveling incommunicado. While I figured the reader would remember that element was there, I was having trouble.
So I suspended my efforts until I had that part written. And this morning it was about 9,600 words and nearly toward the end. So I’m making better progress than I thought.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble finding time to write. I was on a pretty good run but a period of odd shifts at work screwed everything else up and I was just having a hard time getting back into it. Project fatigue, I thought.
Then I realized that Space Heist is an order of magnitude more complicated than A Company of Rifles. That was a single POV limited third person omniscient. Pretty straightforward. Space Heist is at least four storylines and six or seven POVs. Craziness. Attacking it straight on, the way in wrote Company wasn’t gonna work.
So I’m doing one POV now. I should be able to salvage most of the prior work for the next important POV, the more weight bearing one. Then I’ll weave in the third POV that adds more emotion, then the last two which are definitely supporting characters. There are cameo POVs that add details and thicken the story too, but those are mostly single scenes.
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Tags: writing
