Pernell Rogers – Writer

Archive for January 19th, 2024

Hello all! Yesterday, I posted a comment about the difficulty I ran into with my latest mystery. The story came to such an abrupt halt. I had to shake it off, but my mind kept returning to it when I didn’t want to think about it anymore. Other possible stories came to mind, but no matter what, my last mystery clung on for dear life.

Well, 12,000 steps later, I had an eureka moment! The only way to keep the story’s secrets concealed was to scrutinize the timeline and locations of each main character, which was quite difficult. The six timelines overlapped and collided with one another while each character’s location changed. I had to perform some mental gymnastics to separate each timeline so they fit each location, but when I fixed two timelines, the other four wouldn’t work.

After examining the relationships between the six characters, I had to make one character move to a new location much later than I’d planned. Making that single change allowed me to re-examine the timelines, and conflicts. That’s when I discovered everything else fell into place, and all the words I’d written so far didn’t have to be modified.

Personally, that’s what I find exciting about writing. I’ve hit many walls since I started creating fictional stories. It’s easier to create a monster than it is to examine the intrapersonal relationships among characters. The realism of the story lies with those characters. Take care!