The Danger Of Giving A Novel Too Much Room To Change
Rennett Stowe (cropped) / flickr.com/tomsaint
After taking time off from writing to promote her newest novel, best-selling author Joshilyn Jackson is back behind the keyboard with a deadline looming seven weeks away. “I feel like it’s coming too fast,” she says. “It’s coming at me and with bad intentions.”
In this week’s installment of “Writer To Reader” Jackson shares where she is in the writing process of her next novel, tentatively titled “Origin Story.”
Right now, Jackson’s primary concern is that the current draft is not finished. Despite having written as much as she ever planned to, progress seems to have stalled. Referencing Jean Claude Carriere’s idea of the “invisible worker inside ourselves,” Jackson worries she “made the error of giving him a lot of room” by taking time off to promote her book. During that time the worker was slowly changing the entire plan she had for the book’s ending.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the end I’ve been writing toward is wrong, very wrong,” she says. And now, Jackson is reworking her entire manuscript to fit her revised ending, all with only seven weeks to go before deadline.
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