Random Action Scene Comes out of Nowhere

It’s been a busy month and I haven’t had as much time to work on my writing as I normally do, but in the last few days I’ve made tremendous progress on the fourth book in The Color of Water and Sky series, or at least the rough draft of it. I’m pleased to say I’ve reached the half-way point in Hive.

An interesting thing happened during the last chapter I wrote. What started as a simple “character x meets with character y” in my outline somehow evolved into complete madness as I wrote it. I don’t want to give any details away, so I’ll choose a different example, but imagine that this happened:

Imagine I’m writing a fantasy story and my outline says, “a character walks to another character’s house.”

But as I write it, I think, “hmm, maybe this character should meet someone along the way, just to make things a little more exciting,” so I add in something like a bandit along the character’s walk.

Well now the bandit has a sword and starts to engage the character. The main character fights back. Suddenly I have an action scene where I wasn’t planning to have one before.

But wait… if I have an action scene in my book, I need to up the ante. I need to write something the audience has never read before, so I decide to throw a magic metal space dragon in there! Yeah, that’s cool!

But oh no, this is no setting for an action scene. I’m going to go in now and change it so instead this happening in some forest somewhere, our characters are standing on the edge of a steep precipice overlooking a pool of lava.

And there you have it. What started as “a character walks to another character’s house” has somehow now become the biggest action scene in the book.

That’s basically what happened while I was writing Hive. The chapter comes out to 16 pages in Microsoft Word and over 10,200 words (which is the length of some short stories). But as excessive as this may sound, I have to admit, it’s a really good chapter, one of my favorites in fact. Throughout the last few days, I could not stop thinking about how I was going to add to it. I know readers are going to love it and I’m super happy about how this chapter has evolved into what might be one of my strongest chapters in the entire series.

Funny how stuff works out that way.

As always, check here for more updates on The Color of Water and Sky series.

 

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