Work in (Painful) Progress by Dorothy Courtis

 So I had this idea for a novel. I thought I knew where it was going - who the villain/murderer was (I write crime novels) and my sleuth has appeared in three books so far. By now, surely I knew the main and a few supporting characters, the locations and the themes, well enough to just get on with it fairly effortlessly.

I began on 27th October, just after the publication of the last book in the series. I wrote for an hour every weekday till 23rd December. Total 17,575 words. Not a lot, you may think, but by now (this is my 19th book) I know my process. I write very fast and very short for the first draft, basically getting the story down on paper before I lose the thread or the energy. And I keep a daily tally - word count.

 And I print out that day's work and keep it in a folder, the mounting pile of pages a tangible encouragement.

But then all that momentum fizzled out. I wrote again on December 29th and 30th. It was a week before the next attempt - a very paltry few words added on 6th January. A brief flurry of three days in a row later in January and three at the beginning of February.  

So what was the problem? Laziness? Illness? 

The problem was the simple fact that the story was not working. My sleuth was standing on the side lines while the action was racketing off into the distance on a completely unplanned and unwanted tangent. Grinding to a halt was neither writer's block nor procrastination, but a very necessary check to that hurtling out-of-control plot!

I knew I wanted to write this book. I was sure it needed to be written, and by me, using my personal experience to inform the story. But it was all wrong!

So I stopped. And downsized from new technology to old. Sometimes pen and paper are the only way to write yourself into coherence. For me, anyway! So I spent days and days, just writing in my notebook about my characters and what the story was really about. 

Quite simply, I took the story apart and set the pieces out, one by one, so I could look at them - at one stage, quite literally: each scene was written on an index card set out on the floor in the order I'd written them!

And then I began to see there was a better shape, a better way to put it together, to tell the story. With different relationships between the characters. And so I've begun again. From scratch.

My deadline is end-April so I'll need to get on with it. I think it will be a very much better book for the extra work and the not giving up, the trusting that the story I'm meant to be telling was in there, just waiting to be discovered.

So if you're feeling stuck, your stories or characters not being docile and biddable, don't give up just yet. They may simply need a little space so you see them more clearly. And the result will be much better!

Dorothy Courtis writes crime novels with a Christian ethos under her pen name, Dorothy Stewart. The Work-in-Progress is book four of her Somerset Mystery Series. She is a lay preacher for the United Reformed Church, based in Suffolk.