stop. start. stutter.

I am at the point in the book where I am just about ready to drop my primary protagonist down a deep dark well. I keep telling him: Joey, you're supposed to be a sympathetic character. And he keeps looking at me and saying: well, if people don't find me sympathetic, that's their own damn fault, isn't it? (To which I respond: well, yes, but if I don't find you sympathetic, we have a little bit of a problem.)

I'm thirty-one thousand words in now -- or about 30% of the way to "done" -- and the typical second-quarter problems are manifesting themselves; this one is constructed of three interlocking plot lines, all of which are scheduled to intersect at about the halfway mark and start driving each other. Typically speaking, I go into a novel knowing the first 25% of it with about a medium-zoom lens, the next 25% of it with a very high-level overview, and the ending, and see what develops as I go along; if I outline a book before I start writing it, the whole thing winds up being stale and dull for me.

This means that while I'm writing, I often wind up finding out the plot about one step ahead of my audience of cheerleaders. (It also often results in me pasting bits and chunks at people and saying, "Look! Look what the fuck they went and did on me! Can you believe this shit?") I don't outline, anything past a very high-level synopsis. This has worked for me so far, mostly because I've got a very well-developed editor's eye thanks to a lot of freelance work that I've done. If there's a problem with the book, I start to become aware of it when writing it suddenly starts to become like pulling teeth, and if that lasts for more than a few writing sessions (and is therefore not just a single bad day), I can step back, take a deep breath, and start picking apart the text with an eye for "which of the Ten Major Problems is this book demonstrating right now?" (I will make a post about the Ten Major Problems with a book at some point.)

I started getting that little subtle nagging sense of "something's wrong" with this one last week. Just a hint around the edges, which means that it's not a show-stopper; it's something (whatever it is) that I can deal with on a second draft. In some ways, though, that's worse, because those problems are so subtle that they're murder to diagnose and repair until you're well past them. In this case, I suspect -- though I'm not sure -- that it's an issue of pacing; I think that Storyline A and Storyline B might have intertwined a little too fast, while Storyline C is lagging along a bit more slowly. If that's the case, I'm not going to be able to spot it until all three protagonists are finally standing in the same room and staring balefully at each other, asking me what they're supposed to do now.

Writing is hard, dammit.

However, I kind of love my storyline-B protagonist (her name's Charlotte, but her grandmére is the only one who can call her that; she's 'Charlie' to you, thank you very much, and she works for the FBI's DNA Analysis Unit). And my storyline-C protagonist, whose name is Kit, is very obliging. Charlie and Joey are supposed to have the Moonlighting-style Maddie-and-David bickering going on, but time will tell; I think they might hate each other a little bit too much for that. (And no, I have no clue why, but Charlie's holding a grudge the size of Texas against Joey and the company he works for, and I fear I might have underestimated just how much she dislikes them. Which may make for some interesting twists later. You know, if she ever decides to tell me what it is.)

(One of the things I never stop being fascinated by is just how pushy my characters can be. I've seen a lot of writers talk about similar things; for instance, one novelist friend of my acquaintance just had her characters put their foot down and swap Planned Love Interests, without so much as a by-your-leave. There's nothing like having a mental outline that requires Character A to go and do something, and when you get there on the page, he or she looks at you and says: what, do I look like I'm stupid? This is why writers drink.)

So whatever the Little Nagging Flaw in the manuscript so far is, I hope I figure it out pretty quickly. I'm enjoying the world, and I like Charlie and Kit (and even Joey, who's being a bit of a douchebag right now, has his moments). There are a few scenes coming up a bit down the road that I'm looking forward to writing, even. I just have that little pulse of "HEY! Problem here!" going on in the back of my head.

If I'm lucky, it'll be a false alarm; if I'm only slightly less lucky, it'll be something easily dealt with. Of course, if I'm not lucky, it'll turn out to be a major, massive continuity-or-plot flaw that will require four drafts and a bottle of whiskey to fix up. In any case, I'm about four thousand words shy on word count for the week, the week ends in about another fifteen hours, and everyone involved is refusing to talk to me.

I have, thus far, bravely resisted the urge to declare "Rocks fall! Everyone dies!" But man, I've come close.