“Doesn’t the last third of a book feel like the bit once you’ve got to the top of the roller coaster and you’re just gathering momentum?”

A writing colleague posed me this question tonight.  We were discussing my novel, specifically, how I’ve felt like it’s careening from major plot point to major plot point at the end and I’m not sure how to pad it out around that, and consequently that’s been holding me back from finishing the last five to six chapters:  I know what is going to happen, but I don’t feel like enough is happening.

In fact I had finished a chapter before this discussion, with the caveat that I was afraid it was rather short and too much happens too abruptly.  Which had me in a bit of a tizzy about where I would pick things up tomorrow in the next chapter, and how much narrative padding I would have to come up with in order to maintain the pacing of the rest of the novel.

But suddenly my friend’s rollercoaster analogy flicked on a light bulb in the hazy attic of my mind where I’ve been living since I got to this point in the novel.  Of course when I’m reading, I don’t expect the last five to six chapters to maintain the same pace as the rest of the novel.  I expect the last chapters to go quickly because I already know the characters and I’m just reading to see what happens to them.

So why don’t I expect the same thing from stories that I’m writing?

I suppose it’s a little bit like how you ride a rollercoaster without thought because you trust that the engineers who designed it have taken all the physics into consideration that ensure you don’t go downhill so fast you go flying through the tracks.  While if you are the rollercoaster engineer, that initial test run has you mopping your brow because all your calculations might be wrong and the coaster might get to going so fast that something terrible happens.  But in the end you’ve got to trust your instincts as a creator and just design that rollercoaster, one point to the next, until it reaches the end.

At least as a writer, I have the luxury of first drafts, which trusted friends can read and give me pointers about.  I can always re-write – but only after I’ve written.

Suddenly, I feel a lot better about going to work tomorrow.  I’m not going to worry about padding: I’m only going to think in terms of what is essential to move me on to that next point in the plot.  Because my readers will be expecting things to happen to my characters now that they know who those characters are.  The reason my characters’ relationship fell apart is because nothing was happening to make them change and grow; only events facilitate change and growth – and happily ever after.

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Unrelated, though still on the topic of Songs for Piano and Voice, I realized a few weeks ago that this book, though set in 21st Century Waco, Texas, has something in common with my first book, The Collapse of Camelot.  Like Gareth, my lead in this novel is a man whose relationships are primarily with women.  His love interest, of course, but also with a circle of older women who are mother and sister figures to him.  I didn’t plan this; it just happened.  What does this say about my subconscious view of men?