A Pipe and a Keyboard

I finally sorted my writing problems, in more ways than one.

My first problem that I last wrote about was the difficulty of writing in very bright sunshine, where the glare on the screen made it unreadable.  The solution to that was ridiculous in its simplicity – all I had to do was change my Windows colour scheme from the standard to High Contrast White.

That took care of that!

My other problem was the story line I am working on for my Magnum Opus.

I had the main theme of the story and quite a few interesting strands to weave through it.  But no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work.

I have made about five false starts, on occasion getting up to two or three thousand words, but each time the plot fell on its face in a mire of contrived and patently ridiculous scenes.

There was something wrong somewhere.

One evening I was sitting out enjoying the last of the sun and just letting my mind wander, when suddenly I had an idea.

My main character has been happily married for years, and it was the wife who kept upsetting the plot.  I had my brainwave!

I killed the wife.

So the story starts with my main character as a widower.

Immediately everything (or nearly everything) fell into place.  New scenes presented themselves and the plotline is a lot stronger.  I am well into it at this stage with several thousand words under the belt.

Whoever said that killing the wife is a bad thing?

Filed under: Writing on September 13th, 2009