I have to abandon the first 6,000 words and start afresh. None of it is how it should be. I want a gothic ghost story that seethes with atmosphere, not a light-hearted romp through some girl's nonsense adventure. Why won't the things I see in my head, the story I want to tell, come out onto the page? Why is it always something entirely different?
It's too light-hearted, too bouncy, too much humour - this always seems to be my downfall when I'm trying to write and it needs to be cut out, if only I can find the right tool for the job.
Oh well - I suppose I could have called this post 'Disaster Averted', for at least I'm only on the first chapter. Better to discover this now, in the very early stages, than halfway through.
Hmmm...got me thinking. Of my two previoulsy shelved projects, the working titled Devil's Weather has the right tone. Why did I stop writing that again? I can't remember. I think I got about 30,000 words into that one. Maybe I'll go back to Harry after all. The lead character of my most recent project, which got 40,000 words in, was starting to annoy me and the tone had gone skew whiff, just like this one.
It'll require a complete leap of setting, a change in my mind's inner frame. Okay, bye bye London. I'm going back to Dartmoor.
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