Work on Warp Factory is ongoing – slowly. Dear God how slowly. I’ve reached the point of truth in the novella. This truth, as in most short stories is where things finally make sense to the reader. I’ve been building to this for 5 years. The pressure, from nowhere else but my own sense of completion, is enormous.
I’ve tucked away my subtle plot-points in the odd sentence or thrown out dialogue and built my internal narrative, all while hooking in the reader – I hope – so as everything builds up into the climax there are all these balls up there in the air, just waiting to land. The tricky part is the more complex your story, the harder this becomes. Plot elements I’ve missed, logic gaps, a cool idea thrown in in the last quarter which fucks up a major part of the first quarter. Seemingly minor characters I’ve completely forgotten existed (and believe me this happens quite often with me). Somehow Ive got to keep these babies in the air, constantly juggling them all while focusing on the most important thing of all: the writing.
I think the mechanical aspects of narrative and plot building are the forgotten skill needed by today’s modern author.
Flowery prose means shit without a gameplan1.
This is where I am right now. Multiple plot elements in the air, a character I’ve re-defined several times has to fulfill his arc, the idea for that whizz-bang ending becoming more compromised by the logic of the story, which was blatantly obvious at the time yet I decided to ignore it because the ending is cool. And endings are cool. Let’s not forget that. But – and I keep telling myself this in the vain hope it will stick one day – they are not the reason a story exist. There are other bits in there we should not forget.
1 I thought about excluding Stephen King in this statement as the guy tends to write off the cuff and rarely plots. BUT having said that, and for all the love I have for King, he can’t half fuck up an ending.
