Sometimes I have a hard time finishing stories. In the beginning, I'm all jazzed up about a new idea, but then the idea begins to drag, everything goes wrong, and my novel ends up in a dusty computer file labeled "Grave Condition."
But what if I owed my characters the chance to tell their story--even if I tell it poorly, even if everything goes wrong? Maybe I owe them a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe I owe them some resolution.
Whenever I re-read a story I didn't finish, I usually get a sick feeling in my stomach because I want to know what happens. The story just stops, and I'm the only one who can finish it because it was my brain child in the first place. It's so frustraating!
Last year, I wrote a novel for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. It made it to the quarterfinals. It wasn't a bad novel, but it had issues. For example, it had two protagonists. Sisters. I couldn't decide which one I loved more so I kept them both, and it ended up hurting my story, I think.
After a great experience at a writer's conference, I gave one of the sisters--Cacey--a novel of her own. Cacey got her beginning and midddle and end. She got her happy ending. Ironically, Cacey's story had nothing to do with her sister Ivey's story. One was contemporary, the other paranormal. One was set in the South, the other set in the North. The only connection between the Cacey in the first novel and the Cacey in the second novel was that she was the same young woman in my mind--she looked the same and acted the same and had the same hopes and dreams.
Now that I've given Cacey a novel of her own, I recently realized that I can go back and tell the first novel from Ivey's viewpoint solely. It's really her world, her life, her story. I can't tell you how relieved I am to give her the attention she deserves.
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