Plot problem solved and the end creeps closer

Me again, who else would it be? I am going to try and post on a Friday and a Monday from now on, so those of you that are regulars can know when to expect an update. The Friday post will talk about my week's work; how I've progressed and what challenges I've faced. The Monday post will mention any ideas I have and what I expect to achieve.

This week started off badly, I have been writing this novel mostly in sequence. Occassionally though I have woken up and just had to write a scene or get down a piece of dialogue (you may recall my inspiration one night whilst washing up and just having to stop and write the final scene of the story.)

Anyhow, this week I reached one of those said scenes, where I had already drafted quite a lot of dialogue. Rather than make things easier though, I found the process extremely difficult. The problem was that the scene I had written months ago, did not exactly fit the story. Characters were discussing stuff that I had already resolved or decided to omit altogether.

No problem, I thought to myself, I will just incorporate the bits that are relevant. I then found myself writing the chapter to fit the scene that I had already written. It was tough going and felt forced.

I was in two minds, some of the dialogue I had written was really good stuff but trying to include it was making the chapter suffer. I had to decide whether to carry on regardless, or scrap the material I had already written.

In the end I did a combination of both. I started the chapter from scratch and used snippets of the dialogue.

One other thing that had been bothering me was in some point of the story, one character had to find out something about another character. I could not for the life of me work out how to do this and then have the character magically appear on the other side of the land in order to interact with the third character (confused? Try writing it!). Like all great problem solvers, I have been ignoring the problem hoping a solution would present itself. This week, I thought of an excellent solution. It is so simple and makes perfect sense in the context of the novel. I am so overjoyed with it that I have just started the scene tonight.

Word Count 88,000