It’s amazing, writing this thing, how scared I am of moving forward past the point the story is at currently. I’m spending a lot of time going back to earlier scenes and filling them in rather than pushing the story forward. <\/p>\n
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I rely a lot on my characters to dictate how things are going to go and I let them drive the story. Often, I’m surprised at things they do. Writing a mystery is tough — you need to have some idea of what the final outcome is, and I do, but the problem is that I’ve set Charlie Bonnet up to be this waffling, somewhat weak fraud of a detective and right now he’s having a huge “should I keep going or should I give up” crisis…. Not that I personally am — at 35,000 words, there’s no way I can stop now — but what if he decides to give up? Story’s over. And he never finds out all the secrets….. <\/p>\n
I’ve been putting off the standard-issue road trip\/change of scenery that I used in 2003, but it’s about to happen.<\/p>\n
Also: started reading The Big Sleep<\/i> by Raymond Chandler last night. Talk about a brilliant book. Just the very beginning is a great hook, an amazing character set up, brilliant description, great dialogue…. Damn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s amazing, writing this thing, how scared I am of moving forward past the point the story is at currently. I’m spending a lot of time going back to earlier scenes and filling them in rather than pushing the story forward. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}