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Honestly, I was halfway through a writing sprint at the library when my main character's entire motivation fell apart.
I was 2,000 words into a draft about a lighthouse keeper in Maine finding a body, and I realized his secret backstory made zero sense for the choice he made in chapter three, so I had to scrap the whole day's work and start fresh with just the setting and the corpse. Has anyone else had a plot hole blow up a session like that, and how do you usually fix it?
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joelp811mo ago
Happens all the time... it's brutal. Sometimes you just have to let the corpse be the main character for a while.
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tylermurray1mo ago
Read a blog post that called this "killing your darlings." Honestly, scrapping the day's work was the right move because a forced character breaks the whole story. Now you've got a clean start with just the corpse and the setting, which is way more solid.
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abby30827d ago
God, yes. Last year I spent three whole days on a character named Marcus who was supposed to be this witty sidekick. He was fine on paper but in every scene he just felt like he was reading from a script. I finally cut him completely and the whole story breathed better. It hurt at first because I thought he was the funny one, but the corpse and the empty room ended up carrying way more tension. That's the thing, sometimes the best move is to trust the bones of the scene and let the reader fill in the blanks.
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