“Bottom of the Ocean” has been a bit of a struggle. I planned out the plot as I always do – Save the cat, 15 point, 60 point. I don’t have the original paper any longer, but if I remember right I was a couple of plot points short. My rule is 50 out of 60 plot points are required, and it seemed good enough.
Well, it seemed that way. As I wrote the story, I began to see that what I’d flowcharted as the inciting incident was actually not the inciting incident. This was a big clue to me – stop and REPLAN the story. If something that major shows up early on, it’s a clue things are going to go very awry.
I had confidence, because I’d completed several novels, and I offer writing advice every day. Surely this wasn’t a major problem?
Not at first. I keep poking at Act 1, which is my subconscious mind telling me there’s an issue. And for me, the story is not so much the action adventure novel aspect, but rather the transformation aspect of the story.
Essentially, it’s also a story of The Guide – one who’s been there before to tell you what will happen. Which would be nice if Blake was there to tell me what was wrong with my novel and how to fix it!
And there’s a love story wrapped up in it. Normally, experts will tell you there’s too much going on there. Well, pooh, because I’ve read many novels with multiple story lines. That’s what makes a rich novel.
If I’d done the right thing and re-planned the story, it would be easy. But I had misplaced confidence in the novel as I said.
I wanted to deal with the love story.
I wanted to deal with two aspects of transformation – the easy visible stuff like one’s body changing to adapt to undersea dwelling. The second aspect is the emotional aspect – what happens to your emotions when you change? I don’t want to give too much away, but another character curve enters the story – I needed to show how Blake and Heather’s emotions change, by sprinkling little road signs in the dialog.
And I wanted to deal with – what happens when someone has free range of the ocean and everything lost in it? What are your resources when foreign governments are trying to kill you? How far do you go? “What are you prepared to do?”
Normally, that’s the part I like, but this time I’ve been dodging it as I write the climax. Which means to me, what normally is the key to the story is not the key to the story. I want to emphasize what happens to Blake and Heather, how they change, what life becomes for them. Unfortunately, that’s the boring stuff everyone but the writer skips over, so I have to be sparing with that.
But you better believe I’ll write another version just for myself, with more of the exploring, the new world aspects of it.
