Sometimes an idea that seems good turns out to be not good at all. An idea for a novel may seem to hold great promise. I may write a few chapters and feel that I'm on track to create something I can be proud of. But as I dig deeper into the story, a serious problem may rear its monstrous head.
This is why I'm not a full-time professional novelist. When I have a good idea, I can turn it into a good book. I have the requisite skills. But I sometimes waste weeks or months on an idea before I discover that it's terribly flawed. Discouragement sets in. I go back to playing and composing music. The lovely thing about music is that it's not logical. If someone is not pleased with something I've done in a piece I've composed, it is entirely sufficient to say, "Well, I liked it that way."
You can't do that in a novel. A novel has to make sense. The people in a novel have to have reasons for the things they do. Reasons perhaps wrong-headed or unconscious, but the reasons have to be there. Your characters are not pawns for you to push around the board at will.
I've always wanted to write a mystery series. The first two books are now complete. You can download them (for free) by clicking on the My Novels link up there in the menu bar. Hey, I'm off to a great start! What could possibly go wrong?
Sadly, my concept for the third book is, at the moment, a train wreck. My sleuth (we can't call him a private detective, because he's a nobleman; no, he's just a very nice rich guy who helps people who have problems of a criminal nature) doesn't even like the story idea himself. As I re-read the draft of the opening chapters I can see him sort of thinking, "What am I doing here?"
If I were a professional with a contract that called on me to deliver a finished manuscript three months from now, I'd just power on through and not deal with the fact that the plot has a huge gaping hole. Hey, it worked for Agatha Christie. Some of her popular mysteries are saddled with howling absurdities, and her readers didn't seem to mind.
The trouble is, I'm afflicted with the stubborn idea that a plot ought to make sense. At the moment I have my sleuth volunteering to do something that's both illegal and dangerous, and he has no sensible reason for doing it. But if he doesn't do it, I don't have much of a plot.
When I hit this kind of roadblock, I know what to do. I sit down and write a list of, at minimum, ten reasons why my character might do exactly that. This is a great technique. Try it if you don't believe me. The reason it works is because you're required to write down any idea that occurs to you. Censoring your ideas is not allowed. No matter how silly or absurd your next idea is, you must add it to the list. This unblocks your creative unconscious, and pretty soon you'll have an idea that will get you out of the hole.
Unless you don't. I've done the exercise. I've analyzed the problem and proposed workarounds. In spite of which, at this moment I simply do not see a way to motivate Best Thaddo to do what I need him to do. (That's another useful technique, by the way. Never say "I can't." Instead, say something like, "Right now I don't see it." It's a bit of psychological jiujitsu.)
I went to quite a lot of trouble to set up the opening chapters so they would work in a certain way. I wanted Thaddo to be standing over a dead body on page 1. This would have to be before the Local Authority (which is what they call the police force) is summoned. And how could that happen? I rejected coincidence. I came up with what I thought was a better solution -- a man who telephones Thaddo and begs him for help because he has just found a body and doesn't dare call the Locals. Unfortunately, I have now concluded that my idea just plain doesn't work. It puts Thaddo in an impossible bind.
When I was a kid, my father had a whole book of cartoons by Peter Arno from the New Yorker. It was the 1950s, so these cartoons were from the '40s. In one of them, a fighter plane (evidently on a test flight) has crashed in the near distance. Smoke is pouring from it. Medics are rushing toward it with a stretcher, as are scowling military officers. Headed away from the crash is a man wearing spectacles and a maniacal grin. He's saying, "Well, back to the old drawing board!"
That's me today. Back to the old drawing board.
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