The Plot Thickens... then Writes Itself

Funny as this may sound, I have been praying about a certain aspect of the story I'm writing. It is a parallel storyline to the main one, a secondary part of the novel, really, but it helps to setup and foreshadow the main story. Anyway, I have written about 30,000 words of it, but it just hasn't felt right. It hasn't made sense. It conflicts with a lot of historical information on one hand, and it just never seemed to take on a life of its own. So, I have been immersing myself in the history and myth that it is based on, and had the big idea to make it a character study about 2 weeks ago.

So I wrote and revised and invested hours and hours of time that I know is in short supply. The bottom line was, it still wasn't working. I can't even explain why, but it wasn't fitting in and telling the story I needed it to. Plus, I was bored by it, which can't be a good sign for the future potential reader. So, I prayed about it. I pray all the time about other things, unfortunately, I just did not think of God first on this one. I have been struggling to plot-line and whiteboard this out on my own, but hadn't specifically asked for God's involvement until this weekend.

Then this morning during my shower, it hits me that this book is really about the magic. I have created a complex magic system for this novel, complete with gods and demigods and pantheons of many belief systems (more than you need to know, I'm sure), and if I want to tell this story well, the reader needs to be more engaged in the development of the magic system than in any of the characters from the secondary storyline. So, I sat down at my laptop and just stream-of-conscious wrote out the plot for how this story would play out and really explain and develop the magic system with its potential and limitations. It went beautifully! I feel like I have direction and meaning now. I will get to work on weaving this into the storyline and really making it fun and interesting to read. I said a prayer there in the shower and said my "thank you"s, adding in a request that I will remember to include God in my work earlier and more thoroughly going forward.