Finally Some Progress

Still working through my blockage on Heart on Fire. Rather than sit in front of the screen and watch the cursor blink, I did some heavy housekeeping last night, because that’s when I do some of my best thinking. I repotted a few houseplants, mopped the downstairs floors, vacuumed and steam-cleaned the dining room and living room carpets, and thunk, thunk, thunk. When I was done and the boys were in bed, I was very psyched to sit down and actually write 12 pages that I think I’m going to keep. I was telling Leah that I’ve written and deleted this same section of story about 3 or 4 times now, and it was starting to really frustrate me because even though I’ve been writing for the past few weekend whenever I could, I couldn’t update my word meter because I always ended up right back where I started. I always learn something from those writing sessions (like specifically what does NOT happen in the story), but the hard part sometimes is analyzing your own writing and trying to figure out why it didn’t work. The actual writing may have been good, or even great and you will still have to delete it if it didn’t advance your story to where it needs to go. I’m at a pivotal plot point, rising action to a very specific climax and black moment, and every page needs to be ratcheting the tension up a notch. To me this story feels like a fire – the inciting incident is like a cigarette butt on dry leaves, the next hundred pages adds kindling, by the middle, you have some nice coals to build on, and right now, where I’m at is that pivotal moment where you either contain the fire and control it, or it jumps into the surrounding trees. Containment doesn’t make a good story. Conflict does. So I’ve been wanting to let that fire jump and spread, and finally, I think it does. I’m starting to see the possibility of the black moment I imagined when I first started writing this, and it’s SUCH a relief because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able write at all while working full time. So here’s the old progress meter, as it stands. That’s the equivalent of 236 pages out of a predicted 360 pages, btw.

59,000 words / 90,000 words (65.6%)