On Epiphanies

It is said that something cannot be created out of nothing, but that is precisely what writing is. It's taking a little idea, an inkling of a notion, and weaving it into a story.

Because of the aspect of creating this whole freakin' universe out of a tiny, "Hey, wouldn't this make a great story ..." thought, you don't always get things right the first time. Sometimes the things that don't work become apparent in the first draft and you can fix it then, but sometimes they don't become apparent until well into the editing process.

Part of the problem of discovering way too late that something didn't quite work is that you wind up becoming attached to what you've already written. Even if you absolutely hate what you've written, you don't want to lose it. Whether it's just a natural unwillingness to admit you were wrong or it's an unwillingness to admit that you spent all kinds of time on something that ultimately didn't work, I'm not sure. All I know is that realizing you have to delete what you've written and rework things? Can actually be painful.

But then there are those times when inspiration hits out of the clear blue sky. When you're sitting there, doing something completely off-topic and not thinking at all about your story, and you suddenly think, "Oh my God! I know how to fix it!"

I call those moments my little writing epiphanies.

My latest writing epiphany? Expanding my prologue.

I mentioned before that in reading over my first chapter, I realized that it was way too exposition-y. I wasn't sure how to go about fixing that, aside from spreading out the exposition over a couple of chapters. And then while I was watching TV, it hit me: expand the prologue.

This little epiphany of mine means changing some things. My prologue had been a letter from the ghost to her husband (written back when the ghost was alive, natch), and I had about four or five more letters scattered throughout the novel that detail the woman's slide into the dark arts.

Without setting up the conceit of the letter in the prologue, I have to remove the other letters. I figure I can rewrite the letters as scenes or scenelets, much like how I rewrote the prologue.

I'm hoping that putting more of the exposition in the prologue will relieve some of it from chapter one. *crossing fingers*