Watchman For Daybreak Watch

After a couple three weeks in which I didn’t work on Watchman for Daybreak at all, I got some time to think about it yesterday. I’d been away from it for two reasons: it was a busy few weeks, and then I had a plot problem I had to get worked out. I need the main character to do something awful—but either it simply wasn’t something he’d do, or if was something he’d do, then he wasn’t the character I wanted him to be. But I think I’ve got it worked out, in a way that works as a story and won’t seem contrived.

I won’t go into detail about the plot point, but the whole thing reminds me of a counter-intuitive principle of writing that I discovered some years ago: the faster the action, the more words it takes to describe, and the longer it takes to read.

Winter turned into spring, and then into fall.

There. You just lost six months. Now consider this:

The cut on his finger throbbed as Johnson squeezed the trigger, throwing off his aim. Instead of drilling Wheatley between his wide, staring eyes, the bullet nicked his right ear, spattering blood on the photo of Auntie Nell beside him, and then struck sparks from the old-fashioned alarm bell mounted on the wall above his head before caroming around the room. Johnson ducked reflexively, and before he was able to straighten again the bullet was resting quietly in the remains of the vodka-and-tonic on the scarred coffee table in front of him and Wheatley was gone out the window.

Large moral decisions are similar, it seems to me. You have to work up to them by stages, especially if you’re going to have a character do something he wouldn’t ordinarily do—it has to seem like a logical progression, and that takes time.