A strange thing has been happening as I work on Heather and Robin. I normally write fairly short scenes, so that the end effect is that the novel is storyboarded. But with this book, the scenes are more like chapters.

And instead of having constant dialogue between characters, this time it feels like there’s more of the inner monologues, more thinky bits as I am want to call them.

It’s perhaps turning out to be a slower paced book this one. Though, as I’m not yet finished, I can’t say for sure. It’s nice though for the form to inflict itself on the work as opposed to the other way round. Maybe this is the way the story wants to be told. Possibly though, I think the pace will speed up once Robin starts stalking Heather properly.

Which will be nice for him – he’ll be able to start taking pictures. Right now he’s frustrated, stuck for inspiration and his dating life isn’t going well either. But once he meets Heather, I think they’ll have a nice effect on one another.

The other thing I was wondering this past week was if I might be writing a sort of love story. Not a romcom type thing, but something more true to life. Whereby two people just click with one another, regardless of how different they may be.

Only time and a finished draft will tell.

I knew getting a fulltime job would have drawbacks, one of them is of course, less time to write. But I didn’t realise how much less time.

Two hours or possibly three of an evening isn’t enough. I leave my imaginary friends on the street corner well away from my office. They wait there for me. I pick them up on my way home every night. They wait there, rain or shine, until after five in the evening. Patiently or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what they get up to in the day anymore.

And I miss them when I’m at work.

But they’re here now, sitting here on the bed next to me.

And so, to work. Real work. Important work. Work that isn’t dull, not subject to approvals, and above all, work that is not boring.

And so, at long last, to work.

As I was working the other day, I ran out of steam. I thought perhaps a rest might be a good idea. Took two weeks away from the book only to find that actually, a rest wasn’t the problem.

Not enough conflict was holding me back.

There are so many things to keep track of in a novel when you’re building it that it’s hard to remember to ensure the characters hardly ever get what they want. So now I’m going back in and doing a little surgery, putting in a bit more conflict. Which is also helping me feel closer to the characters.

To work, to work.

And more of it please.

Right now, the major complication is this: is Heather coming across as a normal over-worked, stressed out woman? A woman who can’t sleep because the world around her won’t let her? A woman whose mind is always somewhere else?

Are Heather’s ailments doing a good enough job of representing the things our culture could improve upon?

Heather needs to be average and above average at the same time. Which is tricky. And she needs to be sick in a way that’s familiar to people. A low grade fever, nagging illness but nothing that ever really feels worth seeing a doctor about, until it’s too late. Not in a cancer way, but in a sort of Pandora’s Box way.

Heather is sick, the world is only adding to her problems, but she can’t see it. She can’t see that the ways in which she’s told she’s meant to communicate and the amount of communication she’s meant to be doing (in order to live a happy and fulfilled life, mind) aren’t working. She doesn’t communicate in a way that has value or meaning. Which leads her to hospital. Which leads her to Robin.

I had thought that I would be able to avoid what happened yesterday. I felt that I’d put the climax of the novel in the right spot and that what I’ve been writing the past several months was the novel that I wanted to write, with all the things in their rightful places.

And then yesterday happened and I realised that actually, I’ve put the climax in the wrong spot again. But what I’m starting to understand about myself is that this is what happens. I work on the plot until I’m sick to death of it, and then I start writing but it’s only after I’ve written two thirds of several drafts that two things occur to me. The first is that the climax is in the wrong spot. The second is where the climax ought to go.

By climax I mean the thing that starts the novel off in my head. The little moment or incident that I build the plot and story around. In this case, it’s when Heather hires the stalker. I thought that should happen at the start, that it was an action. But now I’ve come to see that it’s a reaction – she does it because of several factors. It comes later in the novel, and the thing I want to write about (that I didn’t know until yesterday) is the build up to her hiring the stalker.

I came to this conclusion in a way I now recognise as the usual way. At about two thirds of the way through a draft, I get to a point where I’m losing interest in the novel, in the writing. And this novel was exactly the same. Not enough dialogue for me, too many repetitive thinky bits…

So yesterday, I wrote down the new plot. It came so quickly, and included details like actual dialogue, that I know this is the one. I say that every time, but I think now I’ve cracked it.

I suppose only time will tell…