For the past few days I’ve been fiddling around with a cranky story. It was an unhappy little thing, something I wrote in late summer and just haven’t gotten back to in order to really fix it. Upon some reflection I felt the hole in it–or at least felt a hole. We’ll see later if it’s the only hole. But I hadn’t been able to decide how to fix it.
Then yesterday afternoon, while walking at lunch, an idea hit me.
This morning I let the idea run and wound up with about four pages of stuff that feels right. Yeah, it needs to be edited down. Maybe it should be two pages. Or three. Whatever. You get the idea. The most interesting thing about this morning’s work is that, while it was kicked off by yesterday’s idea, the bulk of the flow went in a totally different way.
This is one of the things I like the most about writing fiction. It’s like magic. One moment there’s nothing, and then a half hour or an hour later the solution just kind of appears.