Right now, I’m kicking myself. I’m getting close to finishing the ninth book in a series that will ultimately be fifteen books long. It’s been going really well, everything is coming along as I’d hoped and, if nothing went wrong, I’d be done by the end of next week, somewhere between 130-135k words.
Yeah, that’s until I entirely screwed the pooch and I have no idea how to fix it!
I really, really, really hate writing out of sequence!
So, this requires a little setup. The series I’m currently working on, one of two ongoing that I’m doing right now (as opposed to trilogies, which I write all the time), has a particular quirk. If you know the series, you know what I’m talking about. In every book since the first, somewhere in the second act, two groups of characters diverge and they have different stories from different POVs, hopping back and forth, until they come back together again toward the end. It works out really well and the two stories complement each other.
Most of the time, I can just alternate POVs back and forth and write the story in sequence. I can jump between characters easily and keep track of who is doing what in each chapter. This time though, I ran into a problem. On one side, there’s this gigantic ongoing fight that mostly wraps up a series-spanning conflict. I understood how that was going to go. On the other, a singular character was trying to solve a highly technological problem that had wide-reaching effects over the entire series. One was really big, one was really small, both had huge effects over how the story would end.
The problem was, I had no idea how the technological problem was going to play out. This thing that they were relying on, it didn’t work and through the side-story, they’d figure out what was wrong. I just didn’t know how that was going to work out in the end. My entire description for the side-story was “character X works on the problem”.
While I was trying to figure it out, I decided I’d write the other side. That was easy. Lots of explosions, lots of action, that kind of thing almost writes itself if you know what’s going on. I went through, wrote that entire story and then kept going until I was nearly at the very end of the book. That’s where the final battle happens and everything gets a resolution, but I stopped there, with four chapters to go because it was bugging me that I still had four others hanging out earlier in the book. I’d already written the resolution to the problem, I’d finally figured that out, I just had to write how they got from where they started to where they were going to end, along with a lot of character moments and drama along the way.
Simple, right? I knew how it started, I knew how it ended, I just had to fill in all of the details in the middle. I needed those details though because they impacted how the book would get wrapped up.
Therefore, I launched into it and I loved what I came up with. At one point, the secondary POV character goes somewhere and has a meaningful experience that changes her entire perspective. This becomes extremely important to the character moving forward. Everything was great. I wrote a couple of chapters and was down to the last one, just before the two side-stories come back together, when I realized something.
The place that I’d sent my character, it had been impossible to get to at the time. On the battle-side, there was this ongoing fight to free a planet and it does so incrementally. First, they fight for the freedom of the moon, then they go after the orbital colonies and finally, the planet is freed on the surface. Sounds great, right? Except, stupid me, I put my secondary character on the planet at a time when it was all enemy territory. Another couple of chapters and it wouldn’t matter, but at this particular time, the fight hadn’t gotten there yet.
Unfortunately, that pivotal moment, it can only happen on the planet. Right now, it has to happen as written. It completely undermines the trajectory of the character if it doesn’t. I also can’t just move the chapter to after the fight because that interferes with other essential elements to wrap the book up.
I have absolutely no clue what I am going to do. I’m just kicking myself that I didn’t see it coming. There’s a really fantastic emotional sequence that leads into a huge payoff down the line. Without that sequence, what comes later doesn’t make sense and without that payoff, the book can’t end as it needs to. It’s a whole line of dominos that have to fall exactly right and, at least at this moment, I can’t figure out how to start the first one.
I really hate writing out of sequence! If I had just alternated back and forth as I usually do, this never would have happened. I need to take the weekend and see if I can figure it out. Keep your fingers crossed that I actually can.
