The first sentence I wrote today…

…was for Blue Fire:

Amlinn’s Grandfather’s wagon–he realized he still didn’t know the old man’s name–glowed like a rare jewel in the final rays of the day’s sunlight, which set its red and gold paint ablaze.

Words today: 1,277

Total thus far: 20, 953

Now, this is an interesting sentence. (Also an awkward and rather convoluted one, but I can fix that. Also, need I point out the setting the wagon ablaze thing is a metaphor? It doesn’t really catch fire…but in a fantasy, you never know, so perhaps I should make it a simile instead. But I digress.) The POV character admits he doesn’t know the old man’s name. And why doesn’t he know the old man’s name? Because the author, looking back at what he had already written, realized that he–that is to say, I–didn’t know the old man’s name. So this is me writing my way out of my own laziness. However, about two paragraphs later I realized I couldn’t keep calling the old man “Amlinn’s grandfather” and that I would, in fact, have to commit to a name and let Petra, the POV character, learn it.

But then, everything I wrote today is quite likely going to drastically changed, because as I plowed through it, I felt resistance, the same kind of growing resistance that currently has me rewriting Magebane instead of writing fresh material. The fact is, I goofed. Twenty or so pages ago, in the heat of the moment, I abandoned my outline and wrote a scene in a different way than I had initially sketched it. And now I have paid the price, because the fact is, my initial idea, as written down in the outline, was, in fact, the stronger choice. Sometimes it isn’t, and then this kind of leap off the tracks of the plot as originally conceived leads to bigger and better things. But this time…no. I’m going to have to go back and rewrite that scene, and everything that came after.

So my total word count will be all over the map for the next little while. (A shame, really, since I just passed 20,000 words today–which should mean I’m about a quarter done.) I should still have a “first sentence I wrote today,” though, since I’ll be writing new stuff–it’s just that it’s going to be superceding stuff I’ve already written.

C’est la vie d’un auteur!

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2009/07/the-first-sentence-i-wrote-today-80/

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