In the course of writing today (yes, I did) I inadvertently discovered that I have two different men involved with the same two women who are trying to get the money everyone is after. It has to be one man or the other. Pages and pages must be rewritten. Whole chapters. Nightmare.
Did this happen because I took off so much time? Or am I losing it? I understand forgetting the color of a character’s eyes, but this is crazy. And with one man I’m not sure I even did the set-up with the women. I think these three just happen. The reason I don’t know this is because I couldn’t go on with this today.
Tomorrow I’m going to have to trace backwards and find out. And then I’ll have to write new scenes, rewrite others completely.
What ever made me think I could handle all these characters? Thirty years ago in a novel called Some Unknown Person I didn’t have any trouble. That novel has tons of characters. And I even wrote it out of sequence the way a movie might be filmed. There are two different stories in that book and I’d write whatever scene I wanted to each day. In other words in A story or B story. In the end there was only one chapter out of sequence. All this on a TYPEWRITER. That manuscript was 800 pages long. I had to cut 300, but that’s a whole other post.
Now I can’t keep track of characters within less than 200 pages. It’s depressing. Still, I have to fix this before I go on. It isn’t the kind of mistake that you can wait to fix in the next draft.
So that’s my work tomorrow. Bert or Andy?
2 comments:
I vote for Andy.
I just had a editor tell me that he couldn't keep track of the information I gave him on page 2 till the end of the story on page 15, so don't feel bad. We are all so fractured by noise of technology.
bert, without a doubt.
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