Change is a Good Thing ... Sometimes.

Remember what I said before about change being necessary in the writing process? Yeah. It still stands.

I’ve thought of a workaround for my problem in the beginning of The Witch of November, namely the whole bunch of drama that ultimately goes nowhere. And that fix (at least I hope it’s a fix!) involved lots and lots of change.

Step One was to split Chapter Two into two separate chapters (because that shit was freakin’ long). So now instead of ghosts and 911 calls and ambulances and hospitals and doctors, it’s ghosts and 911 calls and ambulances. The hospitals and doctors come later, in the new Chapter Three.

Step Two was a complete rewrite. I decided to take out all indications that Charlie had been physically attacked. No bruises, no bumps, nothing. The kid is just unconscious. That step was both practical and creative: practical because it cuts out the whole “we have a person attacking kids in an abandoned house” line of thinking for the adults, thereby cutting the police investigation out of the story entirely, and creative because it’s more mysterious to have Charlie perfectly fine one minute and in some kind of ghost-spell-induced coma the next.

I also had Allie refrain from telling the paramedics that she’d seen the ghost standing over Charlie. The way I’d had the story originally, the adults figured Allie had seen Charlie being attacked and, in her trauma, confused the town legend with what she actually saw. This way, if she doesn’t tell them she saw anything, they have no reason to question her. Charlie could have fallen in the house, hit his head, or he could have just come down with some bizarre illness like on an episode of House for all they know.

And yes, Allie struggles with keeping information from the adults that could help her friend, but she’s old enough to know that a group of doctors and concerned parents are not exactly going to believe, “The ghost did it!” coming out of the mouth of a hysterical child.

Step Three is combining and rewriting my old Chapters Three and Four. Most of the old Chapter Three no longer applies, since that was when the detectives come to interview Allie. So that all has to just get deleted, which will severely cut into my word count (sadness!).

I’m hoping it’ll flow better now that the necessary-but-unnecessary drama is out of the story. It was necessary because of the way I’d set things up, but it wasn’t central to the premise. And because it wasn’t central, it had no real resolution: clearly the police were not going to find Charlie’s attacker since the attacker was a ghost. So why introduce a plot point you can’t resolve? Out it had to go.

So, yeah. I am cautiously optimistic that I’ll start liking it a lot better now.