It took not an inconsiderate application of willpower to not dance around my desk at the office yesterday. For the last two days, actual forward progression on my Work-In-Progress, a novel of ghostly cinematic horror, has been halted while I reverse engineer backstory. I had reached the point where mysteries laid out in the text and bedeviling the characters would begin to be understood and their origins revealed, but because I was ‘pantsing’ this story when I wrote those mysteries I did not actually have the answers and explanations in my head.

Now, I do.

The last two days have been working out from what is known and what has been hinted at, the full shape of the story, why it all exists in the manner that it does, and just what the scope of the dangers truly are. This isn’t entirely ‘pulled out of my ass.’ Some of this I suspected as I wrote the novel but other bits I knew I was leaving for future me to solve, and now present me is future me, and I am so happy with my solutions that dancing was nearly irresistible.

As is so often the case, once that clarity is obtained, a full understanding of not only character and plot but theme and subtext as well, a new and better first line came to me. I don’t need a whole new first scene but now I have the sentence that opens the novel: After the summer of 1984 Dave Ludendorff never again lived a charmed life.

Paramount+

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My current Work in Progress (WIP) is the first novel I have written entirely by the seat of my pants, or less crudely, organically, without any sort of outline to guide me.

When I started the manuscript, I knew a few key things. I knew I wanted to write a story about supernatural occurrences tied to silver nitrate motion picture film, that there would be some sort of ghost involved (my favorite horror genre), and that I would be using a fictionalized version of San Diego’s Ken Theater.

I had planned to create an outline for this book, but before I had completed much research, I felt my enthusiasm flagging, and waiting on the research would likely kill the project. So I dove straight into it with just those elements in my head and a very vague notion of how to make it work in a five-act structure.

Now, some 73,000 words into the project and with the end, if blurry, in sight, the experience has been interesting, particularly with respect to the characters involved.

I have a host of diverse characters—gay and straight, white, black, Asian, young, and old—but it’s two that have caused the theme to leap forward.

Dave, the protagonist of the novel, is the white gay man who owns the independent Kensington Theater, which he inherited from his father, along with a sizeable passive income that allows him not to worry about such banalities as a regular day job. Dave’s father always acknowledged his son’s sexuality with love and acceptance. Dave never faced serious bigotry, even in middle or high school during the 1970s. He has never wanted materially or even emotionally for anything essential—in effect, a charmed life. Dave pays this back by not only being accepting of others who walk a different path but also by making sure his theater is an open and safe place for misfits, geeks, oddballs, and the socially different, particularly during the midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Terrance, originally introduced to further the cursed film plot, has developed into a gay character with a quite different backstory. His family did not have the financial resources that Dave enjoys. Adding to the troubles is that Terrance’s father believed in socially dictated gender roles for men and found his sensitive boy a terrible disappointment, which turned to outright hostility at his son’s preference for men over women as sexual partners. Terrance’s mother, retreating from an emotionally distant and abusive husband, left her boy without the affection children desperately require. By his teenage years, Terrance had already begun self-medicating with pot and beer, and in his aborted college attempts, he discovered harder drugs and attempted to fill the emotional void in his heart with anonymous sex in public parks and bathrooms. In order to cover his emotional wounds and project an acceptable self-image, Terrance became a person expert at putting on a public face, making him an excellent salesman.

While Dave thrives in and fosters community, Terrance has none and suffers from silent isolation, making him easily manipulable by the supernatural forces unleashed.

The themes that have arisen organically from the writing are the importance of community and that we are not just who we choose to be but also what the world has made us. I wonder what other new things will appear in the final chapters and the coming serious revisions.

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So, I have posted that the ‘E’ on my keyboard turned bad and I lost a couple of weeks of writing, first because that letter is so required in English and then by waiting for the repairs to be completed.

When I got the laptop back, I thought I had regained the forward momentum on this novel. The scene I was in the middle of when everything went off the rails I completed easily, setting up the next twist in the story.

And then my creative sailboat became becalmed, and I was stuck.

I knew that I had to switch to the antagonists of the tale. At this point in the narrative, there were two groups of them, not working collectively and with goals in opposition to both the protagonist and each other. However, their deficit of knowledge left me puzzled as to either group’s course of action. My fingers refused to write the next scene because my brain refused to tell them what it was.

Now, some writers deal with this by jumping ahead and writing some other scene in the story, and then they backfill the bits in between. I can’t do that.

One, since I am ‘pantsing’ this to the extreme, I don’t know what the future scenes are, much less what to write in them.

Two, I have never been able to do that writing out of order trick, even when I have a detailed outline that provides the future scenes. As a writer, I need to experience the scenes as they happen in the text. This greatly informs how I write and how the emotions of the scenes impact me and, hopefully, the reader.

Friday night, after I affixed my CPAP mask to my face and climbed into bed, the answer flashed into my head. The next morning it stayed with me, and I told part of it to my sweetie-wife as we did our 2-mile morning walk by the San Diego River.

Yesterday I began writing the scene, and the words flowed freely from my brain to the keyboard. Sometimes, all you need is a little time.