Saturday 18^th July 2020

Today has been a busy day. I had a Pokemon Go tournament I helped organise (which I jointly won, much to my amusement) as well as a major shopping run breaking up my writing day.

I’ve got to a pivotal chapter. Logically thinking, it’s probably that point in the novel where the second act moves into the third, which is always the toughest part for me as a writer.

This chapter needs to pull the emotional strings together, give the protagonist an epiphany, and set everything in place for the book’s climax. It does A LOT and definitely it’s where the emotional arc of the story hangs its hat.

To be honest, there’s a lot with this chapter I feel daunting. The protagonist has a complicated relationship with someone from his past and this chapter resolves that. From the discussion document, we really wanted to turn that into a very large character beat, and a lot of the work I’ve been doing in this draft has been setting this chapter up.

But, I worry that it’s not clear, that it comes across as me writing myself out of a corner (when it’s very much a corner I’ve written myself into to allow for this moment). Or, that I’ve over done it.

The format of the chapter is pretty much discussion, epiphany, discussion. The change I’ve made here , is to swap the discussions around. Originally, the discussion was with a secondary protagonist, but now I’ve made it with the main antagonist. The idea is that the antagonist tempts the protagonist, and it’s in this moment that the epiphany happens and our protagonist completes their emotional arc.

I ended up rewriting most of this chapter. It’s probably the most work I’ve done on any chapter this draft. Even though I had a very similar epiphany in the draft I’m working from, I wrote from scratch rather than try and reuse.

Rather than dwell, I’ve written it with a view to rereading it both again tomorrow and when I do the final readthrough. This has allowed me to get through this chapter in just a couple of days. I feel I might need to sprinkle some more setup earlier in the book, but I’ll put a note in my ToDo section and go back to it when I get to the end of the novel.

I’ve still got a number of chapters left but in terms of changes from the discussion document, I think the majority of them have now been done. So I’m expecting from here on out to be a relatively light touch and just be about ensuring emotional continuity.

I’m happy with how quickly this draft has been done, but I’ll save celebrations for when I get to the end.