In my previous post, I mentioned that I picked up a WIP I had started this summer and temporarily abandoned to write another manuscript, TWENTY-EIGHT AND A HALF WISHES.
Last week I revisited HUNTED. Frankly, I expected a complete rewrite with the exception of the first chapter. But when I read, I realized some of the scenes just needed tweaking– cutting things out, changing dialogue, adding things back in. The tone of HUNTED changed, the end point was the same, but instead of taking a Greyhound bus, my characters were taking the Bullet train.
And it’s just what it needed.
I also posted I had reached the point of running out of old words to use; I’d either used them all or thrown out the rest.
It was all blank pages before me.
I love me a blank page.
I let my imagination loose and scene after scene tumbled in my head and it’s a race for my fingers to get it all down. A burning story is like a new lover– (pft, like I would know…) –you want to be with them constantly.
Only real life gets in my way.
I have five kids living in the house, four of which seem to want my attention at various points of the day. (What’s up with that?) Sometimes even all at once. For different things.
But these characters in my head of are demanding bitches. I stop writing to deal with real life and they’re there in my head, playing the loop of the next scene in head. Some days, especially like today, when I’m thick in my story and itching to write but dealing with Halloween costumes and laundry and yet another pair of panties full of poop (my three-year-olds, not my own,) I find myself only partially here and the other part of me lost in my head. My kids ask me a question and it takes three tries to hear them. Or I’ll watch them play and realize I’m staring at the wall.
I straddle both worlds and some days I’m more in the land of make-believe than real life. This makes me feel badly for my children, whom I know some days aren’t getting the attention they need from me. Yet I’m unsure how to change it other than race through the story in my head and purge it from my system.
Imagination is a blessing and a curse.
Are you a Plothead?
