Monday, January 09, 2006

False Starts

Today while I was standing in line at the post office, I got out my trusty old Palm VIIx and started writing a scene in one of the novels I'm working on. I got about a paragraph done by the time I got up to the clerk. But almost as soon as I got out of the post office and headed back to the car, I had an intense feeling that I'd begun that scene the wrong way, and was going to have to toss it out and start over.

It's not an uncommon experience. If you start a scene even a little slightly off, it's possible to end up in a completely wrong direction.

At least in this case, I didn't do as badly as one scene I started in the first draft of The Steel Breeds True, when I picked the wrong POV. I got almost three pages in it before I realized that I needed a completely different point of view. The only way I was able to rewrite that one was to print out the first version, then open a completely new file and, using the old version as a guide to the events, write the scene from the proper POV.

This one's just a matter of a faulty assumption. Fix that one, and I should be back on track very quickly. Of course that assumes that I'll actually have the time to do the writing any time soon.

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