Putting Things in Order

I never suffer from what some people call writer's block. That's not what happened to me recently. I know what I'm going to write about.

This was different.

When I prepared my offering for my monthly writer's group, I sensed something was wrong. I have been taking successive chapters of my newest endeavor, The Curse of Periphery, to the group, but the next chapter seemed like too much of the same thing. Granted, a few months ago, they suggested I take one chapter and expand on it. That resulted in one chapter becoming four chapters.

I felt that, even though I was only on page 16 of the manuscript, something was missing. I had not introduced the villain yet. Was it time for him to make his entrance, I wondered?

To solve the issue, I wrote very short summaries of each chapter I had written. Then I cut them apart and, with a highlighter, color-coded each character. Then I played with reordering them.

At this point, I think my gut feeling was correct. The antagonist will be introduced to my writing group tonight, and I think his timing in the story will work. We will see what they think.

I was trying to stick with Joseph Campbell's hero's journey model, and maybe I was trying to follow it too religiously. Even JK Rowling, who I am sure used the hero's journey model to craft her series, made some adjustments to the order of events. If it's good enough for her, it's good enough for me!