I’m Working On Instinct And Blind Faith Here

I just glanced at the proportions of Wizards, wondering how balanced I was being with my two main characters. As of right now there is less than a hundred words difference in the number of words I’ve written for each of them. My subconscious looking out for me again?

I swear there are these huge elements of writing books which I am not paying any attention to consciously but are somehow being taken care of. I like it, but it also worries me a little. I mean, if I’m not controlling it I could accidentally screw it up.

Like, okay, building tension through a story toward the climax. That’s a thing, right? But it’s a thing I have no idea how to pay attention to. Probably because I don’t plot out where I’m going. Usually I don’t even know where I’m going, except in the vaguest sense. But it always seems to work itself out.

But then… with Wizards I had a really different idea of how big the story was when I started writing it. What if the part of my brain that sorts that stuff out has been thrown off? What if the climax happens in entirely the wrong place?

Then again, maybe this is what the quietly giggling part of my brain had in mind after all. When the third book of Path jumped the train tracks and ran off into the tulips I ended up writing three entirely separate subplots in five different time frames. And I wrote them individually, in order. But when I put them back together, interwoven like they should be for the book, the tension peaked at exactly the right place in all of them.

Of course, I still haven’t written the end of that one, so I suppose it still could blither off into nothing…

Oh hello, circular paranoia, I haven’t missed you at all. Please go away.