During what I call the cut and slash, or, more correctly, cut and splice process is when I start ironing out the kinks in the story time-line and the story facts.  Time-lines have always been the hardest for me because, for example, in the present manuscript, things happen in close succession, then jump months to the next significant events.

Bridging the jumps is easy.  However, getting the days, and even hours and minutes into logical order can be excruciating, especially when something that was written toward the end is moved nearer the beginning or middle.   One must shift the timeline “to make room,” which sometimes proves difficult when the insertion is placed where the story is running minute to minute.

Adjusting the small things makes the difference, little changes throughout the story, from onset to terminus, in order for these changes to work.  And it’s the small things that prove most difficult, and, at times, tedious to track down and adjust.  The big ones are easy.  The devil resides in the details, quite literally. 

This particular novel is a character story about two people who are very similar, one an adult, one a child — a dangerous child.  At first, everything seems quite normal, even if a bit dysfunctional…like real life situations which bear similarity — an orphaned boy and a spinster forty-something to whom he is bequeathed by last will and testament by his now dead parents.  Add in state bureaucracy and you wind up with some resentments adding to the already strained circumstances of a new relationship. 

The dynamics, including the occasional oddity, begin to assert themselves to move the story to each new revelation, building both suspicion and hope in the reader along with a creeping sense, a subliminal subversive tinge, that “something is a bit odd here.”   However, these dynamics, their significance to the story, and,  especially, their effect upon the reader hinge on getting details in scene, story, and time-line impeccably executed.  …Yes, the devil in the details — that’s novel writing.

I find the process intriguing and a whole lot of fun.  It’s one of the things that addicts me to novel writing.

Recently:

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