Word-by-word, paragraph-by-paragraph: The unique burden of the author

As I sit here, slogging through page after page of my next book, I have come to a realization. For me, conceptualizing the story and the characters is not the most difficult task. I know story, in substantial measure, from start to finish (and in this instance it is a convoluted journey, with a host of twists and turns – maybe too many), although there are a few twists and turns that may have to be woven in along the way to make the tale a seamless and believable whole. I also know the characters that will play the roles in the story – most of them. For me, the difficult task is what I would call the “velocity” of character development: Trying to pace the evolution of the character without bogging down the story. People are incredibly complex, and I could easily spend ten consecutive pages creating a single personality, and still leave a hundred holes, but that would disrupt the flow of the story. So I have to try to develop each character, after the initial introduction, incrementally, balancing story flow and character evolution. I suspect that a great writer simply puts a pen to paper and it all flows together, without a ripple. That’s not me. I have to struggle through the process, paragraph-by-paragraph, page-by-page…