If you ride Amtrak’s Silver Service/Palmetto route through Florida you’ll experience the unusual sensation of riding backwards for a short spell as the train executes a K-turn in Ybor City (Tampa area). If you don’t expect it, this turn can be a depressing moment in a long trip that, more likely than not, has been racking up schedule delays since the Carolinas. However, if you have been on this trip before, the backwards travel is a sign of good things ahead: you’re about to head in the right direction.
Looks like I hit Ybor City Station in the novel I'm writing now. At the end of May I wrote eight chapters that I will have to set aside. Turns out I need to kill a major character way sooner than I planned, mainly because I’ve decided that her major-ness is all about her legacy to the present of the story, not her activity in it
As a younger writer, I wasn’t able to adapt to the needs of the narrative as it developed; rather I just bullied through when things went wrong, hoping I’d find a breakthrough using cheap tricks. I recently found an unfinished novel manuscript that I abandoned in 2003, and as I read through it today, I see several opportunities for fundamental change that I ignored, and by the end of the draft only a third of the conflicts have been resolved. My concept was a sizzler, but my plan was garbage.
So now I am looking at my self-imposed August deadline for the current project, and without those eight chapters reaching my goal has gotten much tougher. Were those eight chapters a waste? I don’t think so. As cheesy as it sounds, I really relate to the Albee quote from Zoo Story: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” Or in my case, make the K-turn because the direct route doesn’t exist.