This happens to me a lot. When I outline my book where the climax takes place at a certain place/time, I backtrack and plot when the things leading up to it should happen. Invariably, as I write the actual story, things that I sketched out would take three weeks in the novel occur in a singe day or a few days. I’m having this problem with the new first novel of Gabby Wells.
The problem with such a compression of time means that people would be in different places doing different things than I expected. What people do during the weekday is different during the weekend. Of course, I could move the end date to a more convenient time so I don’t have to rework the who and when, UNLESS the end date is an important, well known day, such as the 4th of July.
That’s the case in this first novel. So, I’ve stopped writing for a few days to revisit the structure of the first half of the novel to analyze the complications associated with this time crunch and an immovable end date in the novel and make the necessary changes.
I also have taken the time to realize some of my conflict within chapters or the hooks at the end of chapters could be beefed up. I’ve listened to and read other authors who would suggest pushing through and finishing the first draft before going back and making these fixes, but that’s not the way my brain works. I need the logic to work or else I can’t write. I’d rather take a few days to fix it now, then spend a lot of time rewriting a lot of pages under faulty logic.
It’s frustrating, but part of the writing process.
When I first realized this, I got kinda depressed. I spent a good 24 hours throwing myself a pity party. Now, I’m looking at it as a creative challenge for which the answers exist and it is my job to find them.
So, no I’m going to get back to not writing, so I can get back to writing.