Writing myself into a corner

When I was a young reporter, we’d come back from a meeting or event and we would be under a tight deadline. You didn’t have a ton of time for lots of discussion about the best approach to take or what flowery language to use in the piece. We would often start by typing out our notes and maybe a quote or two that we wanted to include and then start working to tell the story the simplest and quickest way possible.

The newsroom was a crazy place of talk and banter and keyboards clicking and clacking away all at the same time. My coworkers and I would inevitably joke about writing ourselves into a corner, the writer’s equivalent of painting yourself into a corner, meaning you had a bunch of stuff on the page, but you didn’t give yourself a way out. It could be an ending, a summation, or an exit point. 

Fixing the copy

You would have to step away for a brief second and come back, see where the story was going and smoothen out the edges and the transitions. I haven’t worked as a reporter in a long time, but I still occasionally have that happen.

I was working on a novel a few years ago. I got pretty far, a whopping 60,000 words. The gist of the novel was the lead-up to a large multi-car crash. I introduced a business executive, two young women heading to a concert, and a truck driver and followed each of them on their journey, ultimately seeing who lives and dies. As part of the story, they all get to look back on their lives and see where things went right and wrong.

The never-ending story

Unfortunately, I ran into problems. I included too much back-and-forth detail from their past and present days. Flashbacks work well in the movies, think The Godfather Part II, which features flashbacks of the young Vito Corleone establishing himself in New York City, or even Casablanca, which uses a flashback montage, showing Rick and Ilsa’s love story before the Nazis invaded Paris. In books, the shifting backward and forward can be tough to follow. In fact, the constant interruption was giving me a headache and I was the damn writer!

I wrote myself into a corner. I put the book down for a while and it sat and sat and sat. In some ways, I let the project sit for too long. I chalked it up as three months of early mornings —yes, I got up each morning at 3 or 4 a.m. and worked on my novel for two hours, until I had to get a shower and commute to work — that I would never get back and simply moved on. Or so I thought.

Reading with fresh eyes

Thanks to the encouragement of a few friends I met via my blog and a couple friends and former coworkers, I picked up my book recently and it was a fun read. There’s still much that’s missing, there’s still no ending. It just sort of stops. The technology or the way the characters look back on their life needs some work as well. Where’s Charles Dickens and his Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future when you need them? Despite all that, there’s lot of things I love about the effort and it’s been helpful to go back.

I don’t know that I have a passion to fix what’s wrong, but I do have a desire to get back to novel writing. I’m keeping an aggressive blogging schedule and I’m looking at ideas for my next book. This time I will finish. I’ve made a promise myself.

And, this time, I won’t be be writing myself into any corners.