Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
What I’ve learned
A few times along the way, I’ve felt it necessary to write down what I thought was going to happen.
Once was at the beginning — first in August 2011, and again on 9/1/11, just before I started writing. I’ve reviewed those docs and the only thing that has any correspondence to the finished product: the names of the protagonist and her grandfather, and the basic setting (America, near future, highest level of the government). The current plot is a distant cousin to the original.
A doc I wrote six weeks before finishing, when I was trying to get a better handle on the ending? Still has little resemblance to the true ending.
What I’ve learned from this: it’s all well and good to write notes, but it’s no substitute for writing the novel.
For my readers, here’s an example of something from a year ago that has no connection with the finished story.
the US elects a president who is a progressive, and who is interesting in many ways: he is the youngest president ever, he is Jewish, single (his wife died perhaps 18 mos prior to his election to the presidency), brash and honest to a fault, quite apolitical. His candidacy was deemed DOA but when the front-runner flames out in a homosexual sex scandal and the second-to-the-front-runner is assassinated (he is black, and the racist elements don’t want to see another black president), our Jewish candidate manages to win the nomination.
That was my protagonist one year ago. He’s long gone.
D.
What I’ve learned is that WordPress, as fab as it is, is sometimes a royal PITA.
Will the US ever elect a Jewish president? After all, their religion is one of those middle eastern Abrahamic religions just like those mooslims… oh wait.