There's a reason I call this story that, this story being "Dowse and Bleed." It's more than 9600 words right now and I've still got more than 6000 that need total rewriting.
The story arrived in twisted snatches. I started with the third scene wrote through to middle, then started at the end and worked my way back until I figured out I needed to back up the beginning two scenes and then finished the middle. It's safe to say I had no outline. It's also safe to say I had no idea where the case was going or how I was going to get there.
Rachelle is the main character and, typical to what she does to everyone she encounters with the one exception of her "brother," she was holding out on me.
This incident is smack in the middle of a period where Rachelle is ticked off at Justus for falling in love with her (thus not speaking to him), her health is in a perhaps permanent downward spiral due to the genetic tampering by the Department that made her into a special in the first place, and Jarod is annoying because he's passively aggressively hoping to start a relationship with her, so she's being even harsher than usual with him to get him to back off. And I'm trying to pack this into a story in a genre I've never written (detective) around a plot-type I've never done with an original situation I still don't quite understand. The first draft had several problems with it:
- I didn't figure out what was going on inside Rachelle until the last two scenes of the story and then, not much.
- I didn't know why I was telling this story and I don't imagine a reader knew why it mattered either.
- Rachelle only figured things out after I did, which made her look like she didn't know prep, the initial debriefing, or how to do her work very well.
- The story turned from a find kidnappee to arrest kidnapper without any real addressing of why kidnapping in the first place.
- My most important clue went completely unaddressed.
- The ending came out of nowhere even though I knew it grew from all that stuff Rachelle was iceberging.
I'd love to say the rewrite just wrung itself out of me quickly the way the first draft did, but it's not doing that. It's slow going, stopping and mulling, reworking, and sliding back under Rachelle's skin every time she kicks me out. It's weird because her world is so integrated and I have to convey it all to the reader without going overboard. And frankly, this story shouldn't even be happening. Rachelle's not supposed to be working!
Ah, well. That's why this is the story from inferno. It changes its mind and doesn't like me trying to nail it down.
How's your writing?
