Writing progress this week has slowed for the first time in two weeks, and I know why. It’s not just work being taxing on my time, that’s nothing new. The problem is that I found an elephant in the room, and there’s a McGuffin riding it sidesaddle.
It’s the damned dragons.
My current effort of fiction, the Dragon Queen’s Bride, has dragons in some really key scenes. They’re part of how one protagonist is catalyzed from village girl to object of interest. There are some incredible scenes written around the relationship between Ness and her dragon. Scenes that caught my breath when I wrote them, they were so exciting. The conclusion of the novel, which has been written since before I started, is a touching scene between Ness and her dragon.
What’s the problem?
The problem is that the dragons in this novel only appear when its convenient to the plot. For most of the adventures, they’re absent. I can justify it a few times, but by and large, as it exists now, I have no reason for the dragons to be missing from most of the book other than the simple fact that when I close my eyes and watch the story, they aren’t part of it. They aren’t part of the intrigues or betrayals, they aren’t part of the landscape, they just aren’t there.
And that’s a problem. I recognize my options are pretty simple – either I find a way to work them in, or I drop them all together. From a fiction writing perspective, I actually favor the latter – except then I lose my “inciting incident,” I lose my poignant conclusion, and I lose the whole justification for the title of the book. Then it just becomes the Common Evil Sorceress’ Bride, and who wants to read such a droll book?
Something tells me this is what I blocked out of my memory when I dropped this project last year. I don’t want to do that again, but I haven’t seen where the paint I used to get myself in this corner has dried up enough yet that I can move.
