You are the Time Lord of Your Manuscript

My story does not have a beginning.

That did not stop me from writing the middle of it last night.

I’d been working on the scene in my head for days now.  It finally came together as I was working out in the wee hours of the morning, and by the time I got home I was almost shaking with the need to sit down and pour my thoughts onto the keys.

I wrote a slow, cunning scene between a politician and a warrior.  A discussion of treaties and oaths played out in the dim lighting preferred by the politician.  Their conversation was packed with guile and the nature of the bargains of their world.  After barbed exchanges and taunts, their matter was solved by the offering of an unexpected pact.

It was a thrilling scene to write.  My protagonist is kind of an acid-tongued veteran, jaded to the ways of her world and slightly bitter at the betrayal of her leaders.  Her exchange gave me a chance to introduce a new term specific to her world.

I even got to write a detailed explanation of the term, which will be either a foot-note or tucked away into a glossary!

I know, I’m a huge nerd.  I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry.

The thing is, I had an absolute blast writing it!  My work is so heavily action-oriented that I hoard the opportunities to work on the slow and subtle tensions of dialog and intrigue like the precious gold they are.  These moments are fantastic opportunities to show both myself and the reader what makes my world tick aside from all the derring-do occurring within it.

Now it’s time for a confession: I don’t know why they are having this conversation.

That treaty they were discussing?  Nary a clue what’s in it.  Something juicy, certainly!  Aside from that, it’s a mystery.  I haven’t even written the inciting incident which created the need for the treaty, let alone the chain of events which necessitated oaths and bitterness.

Heck, I don’t even know where the meeting took place!  Was it in my main city?  Perhaps it took place in the technicolor nests one of the races calls home?  Maybe some neutral third-party?  The Switzerland of my world?  All of these questions are things which my mind will chew on as the days move past.

This is also a chance for my mind to come up with solutions like the politician in question.  You see, he didn’t exist prior to that scene.  I have been looking for a chance to create a certain bend in my protagonists story arc, and when I settled upon the new term which would be used within my story, what needed to happen with my protagonist became clear.  She needed a meeting, and it needed to be with a diplomat.  Thus, my newest character was born, flowing into the void where his absence demanded his creation.

I cannot repeat this enough: I still don’t know why he’s there.

Yet the energy and opportunity of the meeting which necessitated his birth is the result of one of the best decisions I ever made, one that I am pleading with you here and now on my hands and knees to duplicate.

Stop. Writing. Linearly.

Learn from my mistakes.  For the first 30 months of my writing career I had no clue how liberating it would be to cast off the shackles of creating front-to-back.

It’s an easy trap to fall into.  We are born and we die, and from the first moment to the last our lives are lived in one direction: Forward.  It is no surprise that for many of us, myself included, writing was done in the same fashion as living.

Today I wish to issue you a challenge:

Write your next scene as though you were the Time Lord of your own manuscript.

Take your protagonist, or your world, or your battle, or whatever it is that drives you to write, and put into words the scene that you have been aching to create most.  Do you long for the epic showdown?  Pull out all the stops and throw everything you have at it.  Do your best Spinal Tap impression and crank that sucker right up to 11!

Writing is a pursuit where an authors passion and sheer enjoyment with their writing shine through to the reader.  While there are times (lots of them) where you will need to rely upon your experience and determination to muscle through a difficult transition or to make the hard editing choices, it is equally vital that you seize the moments of blazing inspiration and ride them for all you’re worth.

There are other benefits as well.  Stepping back from a current impasse and attacking a different portion of your narrative may give you the exact tool which solves the problems that caused your wanderings in the first place!

My own story had ground to a halt prior to this morning, and I was tearing my hair out from each new failure to advance the plot.  Throwing everything into storage and engulfing myself in something new was exactly what I needed.  Now I have something to work towards, and now that I have a destination it’s a breeze to find the best way to shepherd everyone to it.

If this is a new step for you, know that your trepidation was once my own.  The first few times I attempted to write a scene which was divorced from the rest of my narrative, I was petrified.  How could I create a story from an isolated incident?

Once I took the plunge and rammed my own personal TARDIS through my writing, I finally found a metaphor which made it all click.

We are the Time Lords of our own manuscripts.  We travel from one scene to the next without regard to their when, and once we have gathered enough moments together we stand outside their time and sort them into a cohesive whole.

Then, we weave them into a story.  Into our story.

You are a Time Lord.  Go experience your world.  Go tell your world’s story.

Time-Lordfully,

The Unsheathed Quill