October 6, 2005
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. A couple days ago I blogged about how I only had 100 pages or so left in the rough draft of the new novel. And then I promptly got stuck. Not stuck, stuck, but my brain was saying there's something missing and it's a bit more than the "more" you're talking about here. I outlined the rest of the novel. Still stuck. Something was missing. I took a day or two off from it.

A few weeks back Paul Guyot was writing on his blog about the rewrite of a pilot he was writing for TNT and how he had to sit down and really dig. This rewrite wasn't just smoothing over the edges and sharpening up the writing, it was really going deeper into the characters and the story. So with that in mind I set my subconscious a message or two: what's this story about and what is it about my main character, Derek Stillwater, that makes it worthwhile for him to be in it?

And then yesterday I sat down to write and I wrote a chapter and the bad guy says something at the end of it that did exactly what I was looking for. It put a slightly different spin on the story, it gave Derek a real problem in his area of expertise, and it structured the rest of the novel--in a way, I hope, that will be unexpected. Because, you see, the bad guys have put a very insidious boobytrap in their environment set to go off when the good guys make their entry into the building. And I had already set up that the outside good guys were going to preparing to blow their way into the building. Now, instead of that necessarily being a good thing, I've got an important task for Derek to do BEFORE they do it and he has to find the weapon, disarm it and get the hell out of the way before they come blasting into the building, guns blazing.

I'm tickled, let me tell you. This is INSPIRATION. I don't wait for it. I write all the time hoping it'll come. Sometimes it just comes and sometimes I go looking for it and sometimes I give a holler and it shows up. There are still a few issues with the story that need to be resolved, but this idea--which came about by examining my character and his skills and abilities--really helped things along. And that, I think, is what novelists really live for, that Eureka! moment when the muses bless us.

Best,
Mark Terry