1 post tagged “tearing out my hair”
Archie is hijacking my novel, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Do I fight him (which I've been doing) or go with it?
So the original idea of the book was this: the story of Archie and Lily, starting when they meet and going through their courtship and marriage in a lineal fashion until the story ended with a pregnant Lily and her happy husband in the garden (with perhaps a foretelling of what is to come.) Lily was supposed to be the center of the story (thus the title, Lily's Garden.)
The writing's been a little slow, (I'm about a thousand words behind where I should be) but that's partially because I keep stopping to do research.
Here's where Archie is driving me nuts- he keeps popping into my head at random ages and demanding his story be told. I've got a couple thousand words already of backstory, and let me tell you he is such a sad little boy. The past couple of days, though, it's been post Secret Garden Archie that's been in my head. And this is a problem.
I'm not sure I want to go there. For one thing it's making my story a little darker then I intended for it to be. I wanted to keep it at about the same level as the original book, (despite the conversation that Kristen and I had about where Colin was conceived...) so that fans of Secret Garden could enjoy it. But if I go where Archie is trying to take me, it's going to involve more angst.
So any thoughts? Do I stick to the straight forward love story, or go for the more angst filled story told post SG (which would at least mention Mary, Colin, and Dickon) with major flashbacks? If you were in a bookstore, which would interest you more? if you were a parent, what would you think about the choice?
