February 23rd 2017: Yep, the story is flowing properly now. I sometimes think writing fiction is a bit like steering a boat, and once it’s on open water all is well. I’m having to use a lot of restraint in the passages and dialogue pieces involving my main male character and the child, in that there has to be an amount of ambiguity in what she says, or how she answers his questions. I think I’ve got his psychology sorted out and his conflicted feelings, so I can only hope it does come over that way in the final draft. I’ve reached chapter seven and I’ve written about one quarter of the novel if I’m aiming for about 80,000 words, and this also means that I’m now well ahead of my chapter map where what I’ve just been writing about was in the chapter three notes. Not only that, the novel has started to take on its own momentum and while its going in more or less the same direction as the chapter notes lay down, certain things have happened spontaneously in the writing, so that quite a lot of how I sketched the story out in the chapter map is no longer relevant. This could be the equivalent of when a writer claims that the characters ‘started to take over and create their own story.’ Spooooky. What really happens is that when dialogue pieces are very lively, they can cause new ideas to arise in the writing and if you are deeply involved in the writing, you tend to go where you are led in these moments.
