I was stuck on the mammoths novel thing for a while, and it's been grinding slowly along, and I know it's because I have a vague idea what the main climax of the novel will be but there's clearly a secondary component to the plot that I have not yet begun to figure out how to articulate. (It's nearly back up to where it was wordcount-wise after I cut like 11k from it a couple of weeks ago because it was all dead ends, but... it's still like, almost 50k and I haven't hit the main plot yet really, but some of that might just be my lack of perspective on literally anything... idk man! idk.)
I was most specifically hung up just now on a moment where a secondary character (he doesn't even have a name) looks at something offscreen, then asks the POV character a hard-to-parse question. (He looks at a gate, and then looks back to POV guy and says "[owners of the gate], friends of yours?" and seems disapproving or something.
The interaction literally wrote itself as I was trying to figure out how to transition from Scene In Transit to Scene At Location where I nebulously figured Something must happen that both illuminates a facet of the worldbuilding and gives insight to character B, which in turn gives character A a handle to hang some facet of their growing relationship off of, for better or worse-- possibly superficially worse but leading later to a resolution.
But I was stuck for about a week because what did Background Unnamed Guy see to make him ask that? I admit when I wrote it, it was meant to kind of be an idle gapfiller, a transition from We're Nebulously Somewhere On The Road Nearby to Now We've Arrived-- what better way to show that than literally showing the actual gate-- but then I was like.... was Background Guy just generally suspicious of the sorts of people who have gates, or was there something specific about this gate and if so, what, and how do I explain that since we're in the POV of a character to whom it would never occur to be suspicious of the sort of people who have gates, since he comes from a settlement with a similar sort of gate and has seen them his whole life?
Anyway. I think I've figured it out, maybe, but it's very first draftish-- POV Character is like "what is he looking at? What could he see? Is it code? What does this mean" and it's really super clunky. but that's what needs to happen to get me to point B.
Here's another weird little process note: I can't tell you how much stuff I write and am like Oh my god that's so first drafty I'm gonna have to massively rework that--
and then in the editing passthroughs I can't find the thing I thought was so terrible?
So that tells you that either a lot of times the clunkiness is mostly in your head, OR I really really fucking need an editor. Marvelous suspense, no? LOL.
[anyhow if you were wondering, this is
the solarpunk mammoths novel i'm posting weekly under f-lock, so]
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