On killing your darlings and making stories logically satisfying

Spent the morning working on the WIP. It's a space opera/military piece that I'll share more about later, but I tweeted at the end of my half hour morning write. That's not unusual. I somewhat often recount how the morning went on Twitter. Thought today's little burst of messages was worth sharing here. It's all about logically satisfying plots. I think that this barrage of tweets makes sense as a group. If not, let me know in the comments, and I'll be glad to clarify.

Interesting #amwriting morning. Added 854 words to the WIP, sort of. 540 of those were actually pulled from another section of the story.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

So, I wrote 300 new words, but tweaked and modified the others to make them work here. I'm counting it. Editing is writing.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

This is the frustrating part of drafting. I had been writing to my outline, but started asking myself the dreaded "why" question.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

Sure, that makes for a fun story, but is it a logically consistent story? Does it makes sense for the characters to make that decision?

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

Or, why are they doing that that way? Why would they? I had no good answer beyond "it serves my plot for them to do it that way."

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

So, I pivoted. The story is better AND it makes logical sense now. But that means some stuff that I wrote previously will have to be redone.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

Which is OK. That's part of the process. But there is some stuff from those bits that I really like. I was able to salvage one today.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

That makes me happy, because, even though we all kill darlings, some of those darlings are harder to kill than others.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

OK, that's it for today's #amwriting ramblings. I'll check back in with you later, Twitter. Keep your nose clean.

— Jarrett Rush (@JarrettRush) July 7, 2016

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