When riding the Tube in London passengers are audibly reminded while exiting the trains to "Mind the Gap." For daily or regular London Transport users, the warning is largely irrelevant and likely is no longer even heard by weary commuters on their daily trudges into the city and back out to the burbs where all but the most-wealthy of London's workers must live. They simply step over the gap between train and platform and continue on their way, no twisted ankles or high heels stuck between terra firma and terra traina.
There's a parallel to writing.
In my case, the gap is the seemingly continually expanding span of time between sessions of writing the next novel in the Winston Patrick series, currently titled “W3.doc” on my computer, though the publisher already asked me some time ago for the title to begin advance marketing. I take that as a positive sign but also an increase in the pressure to, you know, write the damned book.
I experienced the gap in writing Last Dance too, wherein weeks and occasionally months would go by during which no real meaningful writing on the book went on.
This differs significantly from my experience writing Deadly Lessons; I wrote the first draft of that first book, start to finish, in about ten months. To be sure, those were the halcyon days of being on a six month sabbatical from work, pre-child, with really nothing but long stretches of day in front of me to in which to write my literary debut. That and golf, which became quickly evident was not something to which I should devote serious time. Having been granted a leave from work to write a master’s thesis I found that by the time my leave had come I had more or less completed it and turning to fiction seemed something worthwhile to do. It helped that it was a partially paid leave, which meant that for that one and only time in my life I was a paid writer. More on the Deadly Lessons origin story in a later post.
The real danger of the gap is maintaining, hell even remembering, the consistency of the story. On more than one occasion I’ve returned to the story after a significant gap only to find myself wondering what the hell was going on in the story. This happens to readers when they’ve been away from the text awhile but it’s deadly for the writer. We know eventually that our ability to get the details correct and the story flowing is critical to keep the reader from wandering away from the story in the first place.
In Last Dance, I actually found myself trying to pick up a scene following a pretty significant gap in writing productivity. I had to go back multiple pages in search of the identity of a character about who I was reading, only to figure out I had inadvertently changed a character’s name, which was why, of course, I couldn’t figure out who the hell I was reading about. No small thing either: the character whose name I had altered was one of the central protagonists and the homicide victim who is, in fact, the premise of the story.
So yeah, the gap is a challenge.
Which is at least in part why I’m not getting as much writing done on this holiday break as I had hoped and planned (and for those of you keeping score from the last two weeks’ postings, no, I haven’t written the discovery scene mentioned in both those posts).
Instead, I have gone back to the beginning, printing out the entire work in progress to date, which I plan to read from start to finish to make sure the story hasn’t gotten swallowed in the gaps between writing. I need to get a renewed handle on how I’ve developed the story so far, hopefully paving the way for renewed flow and output going into the New Year.
Makes for a pretty decent resolution too.
Next week: this story may be more complicated than I thought.