Eggnog, Rum Cake, and Pitches, Oh MY!!

I guess I’ve been kind of swept up in the holiday this month. Oodles of shopping, parties, egg nog, and rum cake, and not really much time to sit and write at all. But that’s okay. Time away from the keyboard definitely recharges the creative spirit, and I’m spending some time today culling over the first 250 pages of Heart on Fire looking for those little idiosyncrasies that can be tightened, reworked or deleted.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to pitch this story. Pitching the story to me isn’t only a way to sell a story, it’s a way to finish a story. It’s important for me to have my pitch done before the book is done because knowing the point keeps me on track as I approach the finish line. The rising action to the black moment is like the road to temptation, dotted with lots of nice little side streets. At this point, you’ve got these living breathing characters that pretty much make their own decisions if you let them – it’s fun to just throw them in a situation and watch them go. Just tossing people in a situation and writing it is a great writing exercise, but it’s sucky plotting that is detrimental to your end product. You’re likely to wind up with a nice saggy middle that makes your reader go *yawn*. So you have to study the side streets carefully and try to predict where they will lead, and how if at all, you can connect at the end to your desired endpoint. Some of these side streets are vanilla, others are really juicy, and it’s hard to know which ones you should take without knowing where you’re going in the end. If the side road doesn’t make a reasonable connection to the end point, you’d better not go down it. Or go down it if you like (and I DO like) but remember that if you don’t like the view at the end of the street, the best route is often back the way you came.

I’ve written the same sixty pages about nine times now. It’s actually a different sixty pages each time I write it – I choose a street and point my characters down it and see what happens. This is my version of “drafts”. I couldn’t tell you how many drafts I write because of this. I write, delete, write some more, go back and polish, consider where I’m heading, write some more, delete a few pages that suck, and write some more. I think I’m finally off in a positive direction with the ending. But I’ve thought that before with other stories only realize I wasn’t.