Remember yesterday, when I said that I didn’t think I’d have much time to write? I managed to fit in over 2300 words. Today I haven’t written a single one (not on my novel anyway). There’s still an hour to go, so as soon as I’ve finished this post I’m going to try and bang out a couple of hundred words…I’d hate to waste an entire day!
What I really want to talk about today is how I felt when I was writing yesterday. Apparently I experienced something that non-writers think I either made up – or worse – that I’m over dramatising. I came to a point in my novel that I knew was always coming. It was actually the key idea I had that led to my entire plot.
I don’t want to give too much away, so *spoiler alert* I’ll just say that I killed off a character. I’d been working up to it for a while…but I didn’t know exactly when it was going to happen. So there I was, tapping away at something relatively unimportant. I’d just written a fairly satisfying fight scene, and I was ending the chapter by reviewing the protagonist’s feelings about the day she’d just had. Suddenly the blood drained from my face, as I realised that I had hit the key moment. I knew how the next chapter had to begin, and I wasn’t ready for it. Writing the next chapter, I cried. Not tears, but that dry heaving where the tears won’t come. I’d let myself get attached to what was supposed to be an expendable character. I guess it had to happen, if I needed the other characters to be affected by the death, they had to be attached to this character, and so I became attached too.
As I said – I always knew this was coming, but when it came down to it, I really didn’t want to do it. I read somewhere that J. K. Rowling ‘broke down in tears’ after killing off Sirius Black (sorry *spoiler alert* but really, you should have read it by now!) Now I know what that’s like.
As a side note…I was a bit pushed for time when I was choosing this character’s name, so I borrowed the (first) name of a friend of mine. A friend who just happened to be around when I killed their fictional namesake. They found out about it and now all the other friends who were also there are worried about what I might be planning for them… I did promise to write them a nice funeral!
Musings of an aspiring scribbler 