I met my writing goals this week, decided whose perspective the next scene would be, what would happen in it, and drafted my first paragraph.
There are about 150 words so far, but I have a direction now, and I’ve found that accomplishing that is the hardest part sometimes.
This scene is a continuation of the scene I just completed, and from the same POV. I usually like to move to a different character to avoid the story becoming stagnant, but I realize that nothing is really happening in the rest of the story at this particular time. I am also trying to make sure that all the scenes take place chronologically. For example, I don’t want my A character to be doing something on a Tuesday afternoon in chapter 4, and then jump to character B doing something on the previous Sunday at dawn in chapter 5. That’s just too confusing for the reader. This means stacking scenes from one character’s POV. The trick is making sure this character’s plot is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged.
Even when the character development is stellar, I have to be mindful that when having a lot of scenes back to back of one POV, there is a risk of the reader forgetting what was happening with character B way back in chapter 3. I don’t want to invent exposition to keep these characters alive per say, but I don’t want their importance to be forgotten either. I hate having to go back 30 pages to remember what’s going on. It’s a delicate balance that I’m not entirely sure I’m getting right. This will be an important piece of feedback I’ll be expecting from a beta reader when the manuscript in completed.
Even though I met my goal this week, I did not go back and edit my completed scene. I now have 3 scenes that need to be edited. So my goal for this week is to edit those 3 scenes and then send them off to a peer to review.
Happy writing!
