Small Eyes, Big Mouth

Probably not of much interest, but I felt like gloating over finally getting a scene I’d been struggling with together. I knew what had to happen, but making it happen without having any characters act stupidly was tough. I knew it was possible, but finding just the right chain of events and reactions to get me exactly where I needed to go took longer than I’d like.

I’m still not totally happy with all the fighting – tiny, inconclusive bits of fighting seem to be harder for me to write than full-fledged fight scenes – or with the scene I was complaining about before, but it feels good to have another scene with at least a first draft done.

Then I look at the 18 remaining scenes (not counting the not-yet-outlined epilogue) and I feel a bit less good, but such is the life, as the French would say.

Only they’d say it in a silly French accent. While eating a croissant. A snail sandwich on a croissant. And then they’d surrender.

We here at Small Eyes, Big Mouth are on the very cutting edge of humor.

One of my traits as a writer is that I find it very hard to write in a non-linear fashion. I much prefer to start at the beginning of the story and write each chapter and scene in order. This is good on the scale of the whole story, since it means I can serially release chapters. On the level of chapters, though, it’s rather annoying, because it means that when a scene isn’t coming together, it can stall all progress for days, weeks, or even months.

The only thing that’ s worse than this is when I force my way through such a scene, come back to it the next night, and realize that what I wrote was such utter crud that it’s nearly unsalvageable.

Which is what just happened with the third scene of the final chapter of One Hundred Days. Bleh. The worst part is that it’s a simple scene – essentially the good guys launching an attack on the bad guys’ base and the guards at the entrance holding them off long enough for the rest of the bad guys to join the fight – but I just can’t get it to come together in any way that’s interesting to read and flows well.

So I figured I would whine about it here. Because that’s what blogs are for, right?