The end… or is it?
A short and sweet one from me today – and an early one – today I BLOT (Blog on Thursday) as opposed to BOG (Blog on Friday)!
This week, I have finished my first YA work in progress … well, I say ‘finished’ – first draft is completed and I’m having a few weeks break from it to work on an adult novel (see my 2 in the morning post from 20th January). It’s a long way from being finished, and yet there is, I think, a feeling of satisfaction at having completed the cycle. I think all writers must feel this. But, there is an element of sadness too… saying goodbye to the characters whose skins you’ve crawled under, who wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t penned them. So I have mixed emotions, and am especially sorry to say goodbye to my main protagonist, who is lovely! However, I will see him again soon in draft 2… and 3… and 4… so it’s more of a ‘see ya later’ than a ‘goodbye’.
Those of you who read my post, ‘The Plot Planner’, from 6th January, may remember that I was using this ‘creation’ to help with my writing – plotting not being one of my strong points. So, you may be wondering how it’s gone… if not, just humour me! I didn’t completely stick to it – I don’t think that was ever the idea anyway – but I did follow it mostly. And yes, I would make one
again – definitely! It got me through the first quarter of the novel spectacularly well, and the first quarter of the middle bit. But, I confess, I had mad frenzies in the the latter part of the middle bit, where I peeled off some of the strips and shuffled them about a bit and stuck them back on in other places, and sometimes didn’t stick them on – as you will see by the blank spaces in the pic opposite! Sometimes I ripped them into pieces. Sometimes I wrote a new idea on the other gunky gluey side of them and whacked that on somewhere. It was a lot more random than I’d thought it would be, and once I was into the last few chapters of the endy bit, things got even more random… in fact, I forgot to look at it for a few days, and when I went back to it was surprised how much I’d veered off course.
The thing is, it was fine. I knew where I needed to be at the end, and I was still heading there, albeit by a slightly more circuitous route. But that’s good isn’t it? When you get in the car, sometimes it’s nice to follow your nose – you can always get to wherever you want to be from wherever you are… a nice motto to have in life maybe. Anything is possible!
Speaking of which, this week I have been made into toast by a fellow tweep @darbythefirst surely proving that anything really is possible.
Do you find it difficult to let go of your characters?
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