Plot Bomb! Wheee!

I think today’s is the first real, full-on plot bomb of the new book.   There I was, typing away about Ky being at mmph, doing urrmph, and then suddenly it came.   Fast and hard, so fast that I had only a couple of seconds of knowing what I was going to type and thinking, as one does, “What the–?!” as my fingers spelled it out.   What?   That?  Why?  The other character methodically explained; Ky was as dumbfounded as I was.

The wonderful thing about plot bombs is that they revitalize both the story and the writer, whether they need it or not.  It’s like having ice cubes dumped down the back of your shirt, in terms of surprise and that involuntary startle movement.  But instead of being wet as well as cold, and having to deal with a lot of people laughing at you (yes, it happened to me in real life) ,  the plot bomb cracks open a whole new possibility for the story, and shoves you through a wall you thought was solid into…something else.

So now Ky is headed for something I’d never even considered (nor had she!)  and certain other things that seemed a bit scattershot are now revealed as having fit into this long before.  I’m eager to go on, but my hands are not, so there must be a pause for lunch and some knitting before coming back to it.

5 thoughts on “Plot Bomb! Wheee!

  1. Yea! Plot bomb! You speak of some things fitting in long ago. Do you think about how much your subconscious controls your stories?

    1. Not really. Because thinking about how I do it switches tracks, and deep self-analysis isn’t compatible with writing a story at the same time. I can talk about the technical aspect of writing on the same day that I’m writing a story but it’s fatal to the work to do the navel gazing that prodding the subconscious requires while actually working. In part that’s because the stuff that rises out of the depths needs to have been bubbling in the cauldron long enough to lose obvious connection to the details the sub-C works on, or the characters wouldn’t be themselves. In part because I’m directly aware of many of the experiences and influences that shape my stories. When I’m writing, I’m writing, and at that point, all the threads–coming from different layers of myself, different times in my past–are running through my mind’s hand, pulled by the inertia of the spinning wheel as they ply into one yarn.

    1. Not just that, in this case. Switching from “writing the story” brain-set to “editing the story” brain-set is not the same as switching from writing the story to self-analysis. The tools of self-analysis (whether of the writing process or anything else) aren’t the same as editing tools OR writing the story tools. For every task, there’s a set of tools and raw materials.

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