I first started what I then called Soul Stone<\/i> in 2010, and wrote three good chapters, just going with what came to me. Then I wrote sixty thousand words from my head and came to dead stop, a victim of intellectual ought-to and disregard of character. It took me eight years to figure out what I had done wrong. I kept the first three chapters, threw the rest away, and carried on from where I should have left off.<\/p>\n
I created a new and marvelous and complex setting, with which I expected to have a lot of fun, and tried to explore it, but no matter how wonderful a setting is, it isn\u2019t a story. The setting is still there, but I\u2019m not using it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I wrote a series of chapter objectives, things that each chapter had to accomplish, and superficially they were right. But the story was a robot, it never came to life. I threw it all out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I tried other ideas, a but each was only an idea, none of them informed or supported a story. I had forgotten to listen for that whisper from my muse. Every attempt to anticipate future chapters failed. I let my character grow, discover truths I didn\u2019t know about, experience events that came by surprise \u2014 to me as well as to him \u2014 which made those future chapter ideas irrelevant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Eventually I knew that there were three possible endings, and I very carefully did not try to decide which one it would be. I knew what my last chapter was about, and I finished it, and I discovered what the real ending was \u2014 and it still gives me chills.<\/p>\n When I finished reading aloud all three times, for text, for story, and for performance, I put the whole thing into Voice Dream, which read it aloud to me, so that I could hear it. There were more little things to fix, some of which I had read over far too many times.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s been a long time coming, but now, The Gift and The Price<\/i> is done. Yes, the second \u201cThe\u201d is capitalized. I like it a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I first started what I then called Soul Stone in 2010, and wrote three good chapters, just going with what came to me. Then I wrote sixty thousand words from my head and came to dead stop, a victim of intellectual ought-to and disregard of character. It took me eight years to figure out whatContinue reading →<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-648","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","no-thumb"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/648\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allen-wold.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}