Finally finished that short story after 8 months of false starts

I had this sci fi prompt about a space elevator breaking down and kept writing myself into corners. Last week I deleted 2,000 words on a Tuesday night because the dialogue sounded like a bad video game. Instead of scrapping it again, I rewrote the whole thing from the middle character's point of view. It actually clicked this time and I got through the ending without crying. Has anyone else had a prompt that just refused to cooperate until you flipped the perspective?

3 comments

3 Comments

clairen8529d ago

Wait, isn't flipping the perspective kind of a cheat? I mean, if the story has a problem, changing whose head you're in won't fix a broken plot. That space elevator prompt sounds like it needed structure, not a new narrator. I tried that once with a mystery story, swapped from the detective to the suspect, and ended up with two messy viewpoints instead of one clean one. Sometimes you gotta just stick to the hard work of fixing the actual scenes and dialogue instead of hoping a different angle does the job for you.

beth_reed28d ago

Nah but see you're missing the point though. @vera514 said it right: sometimes you end up with double the mess instead of one clean fix. The issue with your mystery story swap from detective to suspect is you didn't start with a solid structure first. You just switched and hoped it'd magically work. What makes you think the new narrator won't just bring their own baggage into the mess? Like if the plot is broken, the perspective shift just gives you two broken sets of scenes to untangle instead of one. Gotta ask yourself: did you ever map out the suspect's voice before you swapped or did you just wing it?

vera51429d ago

Yeah nothing kills momentum like doubling the mess instead of fixing the original one.