ep 12: Scene 4 : Splintered Leadership updated to Demon Bonded!
Gonna be real, I’ve forgotten so much of writing has to do with pacing. Like, my brain wants to focus on all the things it’s noticing it’s struggling with, aka, memory related. It wants to build a visual scene so I can pin it all down (cuz my inner screen is mostly blank), and it takes layers and layers of drafts to finally paint that picture with words. (Hoping it’s not generic or something I did before and forgot.) And it wants to remember all the things because, since the MCAS wiped out my working memory and memory retention hardcore through 2020-2022, that underlying fear gets a lot of attention. Even as I’m writing this part of the story, just getting words down, my brain is all about these visual and memory details cuz it thinks that’s what’s important.
But it’s not. That’s just window dressing. The real war happening is where I’m coming up with all these fun, exciting ideas on the fly and figuring out what to show, what to tell, what to hold back to grow interest and suspense, but hopefully not confusion. This is all the decision fatigue of writing that goes into pacing as you count all the questions you’re leaving to be answered, and try to guess how long until your reader doesn’t care if it’s answered and just leaves. And legit, I don’t know if I’ve found the flow yet.
This is a complicated set of scenes, which is why I put this story down when my brain broke. I’m introducing a bunch of characters, an entirely different area, a magic system, multiple morality systems, people with goals and intentions and interactions that have absolutely nothing to do with our main character — but all through his point of view. It’s difficult because this could be a play Ky is watching for how little it has to do with him, beyond the shrapnel of Tobias’s demons. While at the same time, he’s the very reason this play is happening, these people are meeting, decisions are being made, an organization is in crisis, etc. He set things in motion while completely detached. But I have to make it matter to/through him, otherwise… why are we here?
Everything up to this point put Ky in the center. Now he’s bringing that center into an already established world, but he’s not landing center. He’s landing off to the side like the nobody he is to the coven. It is such a change of everything, and it’s only as I’m writing it that I can see how I need to adjust, where to focus, etc. Cuz I can’t know until it hits right (or wrong and I can correct).
I know it’s going to take time to get back to that skill set, that flow and confidence in writing… But I’m impatient. I just want things to work the first time so I can tell the story best. But like everything that is mistaken for talent, it’s really just hard work and repetition, doing the thing again and again until it looks easy. It’s remembering that the things we do well aren’t necessarily easy, we’re just too interested and invested to give up when it’s difficult. It has to be a satisfying challenge, otherwise one can turn showing up into the challenge instead, which is a problem all its own…
