Blocking Breakthrough!

So I have been thinking, ruminating, pondering, mulling, musing and meditating over how to block the ending to my book. Blocking is a stage term that means to set the actors and scene in a play to facilitate the performance. In book form, it basically boils down to how to set up and carry through a scene.

On a stage, you can have actors doing different things at the same time because the medium of a play is both aural and visual. In a book, its a little more difficult in that you have to somehow convey the idea that multiple things are happening in the linear progression of chapters.

So while an earlier post mentioned it was much easier to write the ending of the book, I have decided that I must amend that particular commentary to say that it is much easier to visualize the end of the book as opposed to write it. In other words, I know what happens, but with so many things happening at once, in what order do they happen? Or, more importantly, in what order do I tell you, the reader, what is happening?


This evening, fighting an enormously annoying return of my Headache from Hell, I decided to return to the ending after spending a few evenings revising Chapter One. The break was worth it! Once again, the words started to flow and the characters fell into place without being forced. As I have said in the past, after 100k words, these characters know when I am struggling. Last time, it was the main character that dominated the mental conversation asking me if I really wanted him to do what I was telling him he was doing, because he thought it was horsebleep. He was right.

This time, one of the primary villians kept poking me saying "I need to be in this scene, I need to be in this scene," even though I was stubbornly refusing to put him in there. Then, tonight, I saw exactly where he needed to go and voila', the blocking was complete and I ended up with a longish (3800 words) chapter that still reads at the accelerated pace that an ending should. Once again, the character was right. I will most certainly go back and trim this chapter down a little, but now I am very happy with the way it flows and I am looking at moving on to my final couple of chapters.

So the lesson for the evening? Listening to the voices in your head is probably a good idea if you are trying to write a book.