Writing Climactic Scenes is Time-Consuming But Exciting

I’m now working on the big climactic scenes. Scenes, you ask? Plural? Yep. There is a lot going on at a few different locations across a certain city leading into and during the scenes. I’ve been going over the scenes I’ve got down so far again and again. One of the tricky parts for these is getting the pacing right. You can’t have a very tense or highly paced scene at the beginning of the buildup and then have the big climax not be as tense or fast-paced as the previous scenes. So, you have to try to build tension and pacing as you go, so the climax is, well, the climax. As you get closer and closer to good tension-building or pacing, reading the scenes feels more and more exciting. Another tricky part, at least for this book, is telling stories at different locations that are happening at basically the same time. I think I’ve got a handle on it, though, so we’ll see.

As far as writing progress, I’m guessing there is only one short chapter after this one (denouement), and a short epilogue, so I’m pretty darn close to finishing the first draft. /wipesbrow

V for Vendetta popped up recently on Netflix or Hulu, I forget which, and I passed the time one evening watching it as I ate dinner. I was thinking recently that my writing process is a bit like setting up a large domino knock-down art piece, like the ones V creates and starts in the movie. One has to design the pattern you want the dominoes to follow, then you have to get the right dominoes into the right places at the right times so that they can then be knocked down to create a fantastic show. It’s exciting when you find that some dominoes are already where you need them, or when a domino that you placed earlier for some other reason shows you an even better pattern to follow later on.

Don’t forget that there is a Follow author option on each of Amazon’s author’s pages so that you can be notified when your favorite authors have new items available on Amazon. If you’d like to know when I have new books available for purchase on Amazon, click the large Follow button near the top left of my Author Page.

Until next time, happy reading!

Finished Read-through of Near-Complete Book 4 Draft. On to Writing the Final Chapters!

I just finished another read-through of the draft so far. I found the typical things: misspellings, double words (the the door), wrong character name used on a speech tag, etc, but I also found some instances where event sequences, people’s knowledge of what took place in them, was out of order. Typical, too, are places where re-writes of sentences or paragraphs were needed for better flow, clarity, or where trimming was called for. I’ve also found a few places where I need to tweak the emotion or action for pacing reasons, and will fine-tune those as I go. In a previous post I talked about mixing literary and commercial (emotion and action, in simplified terms) beats, and I’m tying to get a combination in this book that works for me. It’s a delicate balance, but worth getting as close to right as possible.

At any rate, next up is writing the draft of the last couple of chapters. I can see the finish line! 🙂