So, I’ve found myself a little bit stuck. Two-thirds of the way done with Adam’s Name, which is turning out to be novella length, and I’m stuck. I don’t like the outline for the third section. It introduces a new character whose role could easily be fulfilled by someone who’s already in the story. It makes the ending cheap, but believable. I like very much where the characters ended up, but I really don’t like how they got there.
I did something that I don’t often do. I talked to my wife about my writing. As with most things that I am passionate about, I slip all too easily into taking-it-personally mode when she and I talk shop. You see, she’s a writer too, with actual degrees, and all kinds of smarts. But her focus, when it comes to both reading and writing, is on a totally different group of genres. Until I picked up Adam’s Name again, anyway.
She asked lots and lots of whys. At the get-go, it made me a bit uncomfortable, so I fired back with a why of my own: why do these details matter if the story is character driven? Because what the characters do and why is important, she said. Not just with each other, but with the world (or worlds) that they live in. She also agreed with me that in a novella, the final third of the story was far too late to bring in a new character. She was, of course, right on both counts. Since then, I’ve been worldbuilding. I’ve determined what Adam is, where he came from and how, and thus established how he can do what he does. Much of this came from my wife’s wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if suggestions, which I tweaked and ran with.
I’m now working on the villain, who I like to call our good friend Walter. Figuring out just how villainous he is has proven difficult. I may end up being surprised with a human being as a villain, instead of an embodied human flaw. But will a human being contain enough cheese? Maybe. There is that whole demon pact thing.
