Getting in the van already

If you’ve read the first couple posts of this blog, you may be wondering about the details. It’s one thing to work on the second draft of a novel in ten-minute increments and say it went better than expected, even better than it did for my flash fiction, but what, exactly, does “better” mean?

I’ll answer that with an example. And in this example, my character needed to just get in the van already.

She didn’t want to get in the van. She wanted to stay home, even with her relatives pressuring her to come along, even when her cousin had already packed her bag for her. They needed her in the van. I needed her in the van. Yet aside from getting her family to shut up and quit nagging her to come with them, she didn’t have any real reason to go along.

This is where my ten minutes came in.

When I’d sat down with this section before, I got lost in the vast amount of words/worldbuilding/characters/subplots/EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE STORY. It was like swimming in the ocean—not at the beach but in the middle, far from shore, where you have no idea where to go, if you’re pointed toward the nearest shore, or even if you can get yourself anywhere meaningful before the waves sweep you away. I could come away from a long writing session without being able to say exactly what I’d done during my one or two hours except tread water.

But when I returned for ten minutes, I knew my time limit. And that knowledge helped me narrow my focus to just one thing: how to get my main character in the van.

In the first draft, she doesn’t go willingly. One of her cousins tugs her into the van, where she smacks her head and is unceremoniously driven off as she nurses a headache. But thanks to the clarity that comes after draft one, I knew that she had to get in the van of her own accord. And I wanted to make that happen during the next nine minutes. (I spent my first minute, give or take a few seconds, on rereading the scene in the first draft. The clock is ticking!)

So I thought about that thing that’s so crucial when you want a coherent story but that often falls by the wayside for me in first drafts: What does my character want more than anything? In this case, my character wanted to see her brother, whom she hasn’t spoken to in a year because of a family argument. Refocusing on her goal allowed me to see that if she connected getting in the van with her goal of seeing her brother, she’d do it in a heartbeat—or about three minutes of writing time. So I let the cousin who’d previously yanked her into the van tell her a little white lie (another minute), and sure enough, she was in that van even faster in the second draft. I got to sail along to the next scene during the remaining five minutes because my time limit made me focus on what really matters: what my character wanted.

This showed me not only the importance of prioritizing your character’s goal but also the need for a goal of my own during such a small writing time. Next week I’ll tell you how I figure out what I’d like to do with my five minutes.