Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

I was working on my WIP earlier in the week and hit a snag. My MC was to confront someone with whom she has a heavy history, but a problem I hadn’t anticipated manifested. See, she was all set to speak very plainly, reflecting on their previous conflict to address the crisis at hand, but others were present who didn’t know who she is. That impacted what she could say and how, and blew-up the dynamic and result I’d planned – a result needed to move the story forward. Now, stuff like this happens all the time when writing, but this was the most impactful issue I’ve encountered (I’m a rabid outliner and that’s where I usually find this stuff, before the writing starts). I could have removed the other folks, but the scene was in an interrogation room in an FBI office, so they were observing from behind a two-way mirror. I could have moved the scene, but the guy with whom my MC needed to talk was in custody. I could have had him not-in custody, but that would have sent a shockwave of changes one hundred and fifty pages back through the book. None of those options were viable, so I decided to go with it, giving my MC a hurdle to overcome. Yay conflict! That’s the focus of this week’s FYI:

Someone much smarter than me once said, “Life imitates art.” In the same way a story you’re crafting can go in directions you didn’t anticipate, life often won’t go according to plan. You can either fight against it, trying to force something into an unnatural shape, or go with it, seeing what happens.

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}