On their day off, some folks like to puff on those trendy new electronic cigarettes. Not me; I’m not a smoker. No, instead, I like to find time to write… or read, as inspiration to get back to writing more on my novel.
Believe it or not, I’m contemplating a 3.0 start on my novel, not because of losing my progress (yay!) but this time because I’m rethinking the way I’m rolling out the narrative; while it helped get me past my writer’s block on the novel after I lost my first draft to a crashed hard drive over a year ago, I now think that the “flash forward and tell a third of the novel in flashback” approach may not be the right take, from a dramatic standpoint.
I mean, look, my protagonist is being haunted by a murder victim he is accused of murdering, but whom he did not kill. The victim’s ghost knows this, but proving it to law enforcement? That’s another matter.
While starting the novel at a point where he’s captured and interrogated by the local and state police may be a great way to introduce all my plot elements quickly (including the fact that he’s being haunted by a murder victim he discovered), I simply can’t imagine him confessing to ANYONE that he’s being haunted, and then being allowed to go free, even if a guiltier suspect walks into the police station and confesses to the crime. It’s just too much of a stretch of credibility, even for a light-hearted murder mystery dramedy.
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