I’m working on my upcoming novel today, Trouble In Tallulah Falls, the third book in the Magnolia Bluff Murder Mystery Series. I’ve been writing on it for several months now (which is a very unusual length of time, for me), but I’ve come to a frustrating point in the process.

I’m stuck.

It isn’t writer’s block. It’s just…stickiness. 

It’s the plot, really. I’m not a plotter or a planner. I’m a “panter”, as they say. Meaning, I fly by the seat of my pants when I write, letting (as Stephen King has said) the story lead me where it will.

And that has served me very well over the course of my brief writing career. Not that I have no idea where a story is headed, but I don’t like plotting it out ahead of time with a detailed outline or plot progression. It feels natural to me to just let it fly, so that’s how I do it.

But today, I’m stuck

I’m about 20,000 words in on what will ultimately be a 60-70K word book…so about a third of the way there. And I’m happy with the content, as far as content goes. But when I look at it, it's just spinning and spinning. Like watching a browser arrow go around and around, but the page never loads. 

It feels like watching one of those things…what's it called? Newton's Cradle? Where you have half a dozen steel balls suspended in a row, and you pull back one and let it go, knocking one up on the other side, and so on and so on. And it appears that this would go on forever, if you let it.

Yeah. That’s this.

I’m in a state of perpetual tension-building and I don’t see a clear path to get out of it. So what's a guy to do? Well, I’m thinking about pulling a Stephen King and “killing my darlings”.

One time, in an interview about writing The Stand, King found himself in a similar place, with a world built and a cast of characters…and nowhere to go with them. So what did he do? He blew them all up, taking inspiration from William Faulkner, who famously said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

I’m not about to kill off the citizens of Magnolia Bluff. But I’m strongly considering deleting and rewriting about half of my first draft, here. An idea that scares the bejezus out of me.

But you know what? I think it must be done. OK, maybe. :)

I haven’t decided for sure, yet. But I am in a destructive frame of mind.

We’ll see what the fate of our fair manuscript is, in a day or so. Until then though, y’all pray for me. This is gonna be hard on an old man, I can tell. But let’s see if anything can be done.