Oh, is it the third Friday already?
Right. Uh, write.
What do you do when you realize that the reason the story you are writing has stalled is that it has the wrong main character? Well, you either change who the MC is, or you refocus on the first one with a lot more words.
And how did I get here? Uh, I forgot a very valuable lesson from a writer more experienced and better than I’ll ever be.
Dave Freer, one of my earliest mentors, recommended knowing how the story will end, so you have something to aim for.
Not that you might not shift your aim. But if you haven’t got one, your story turns into a wandering mass of hopefully entertaining words, that in the end leave a reader unsatisfied.
So, I now have to go check my aim and get back to work. And with the current freeze hitting Sunday night, I (now that I have identified the problem) anticipate writing happily away in front of a roaring fire in the fireplace.
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “AIM!”
Your mentor’s advice is one of the many versions of “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” I guess you could write a story (or undertake any project) that way, but Ithen how would you know when you’re done? Yeppers, have that target defined from the start!
Endings are awesome. I’ve known how Dr Z would end for a very long time. It’s the other bits that make things messy. Some of the readers think one of the side characters is engaging in a romantic plot! That is not only not happening, but in opposition to another side plot that is almost ready to be revealed.
Then we have the conspiracy theorists that think the wampus cat is actually sentient (she’s all of two months old but very precocious), the MC is actually a wizard of nanites, and the wider world is… well, best not to get into that one.
In the end, there will be resolution. Things will happen. Plot threads will get tied up in neat little bows with sprinkles on top (mixed metaphors are a feature, not a bug), and teasers for the next arc will be tossed out like party favors.
The bare bones of the plot keep getting beefed up on the way, though. I predict more research to be done in the future. Politics, history, war history, orbital mechanics I need to brush up on (thank you Kerbal Space Program), microbiology, terrestrial invasive species/bacterial spread theories, and a lot of genetics homework.
I do more study for stories than I ever did for any job or degree I ever got.
Life is full of complications. I find that outlining knowing the ending means I have to work at it to figure out how my characters can have difficulties figuring out what they need to know by it — and not knowing it means a lot of thrashing about.
(But I pin it down in the outline stage.)
My very first novel. The first run through, I got to the fourth chapter and discovered that the hero wouldn’t work, and the bad reptile, er, bad guy should have been the hero. And the character who was supposed to hang around and get done in was way too street smart for that, so he boogied and dragged part of the story in a different direction.
I thought I knew how the story would end, except … it didn’t work, so I had to toss plans out the door and let my hind brain have free rein. That worked. The novel still has huge flaws, but at least it tells one far more coherent story.
When the characters take over, the wise writer steps aside and lets them run wild. I think when they’re real to the writer, they seem like real people to the readers.
Order and coherence can (sort of) be added later.