This was a tough writing week for me. I felt like I was trying to squeeze water from a stone. For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a pivotal scene in which I know what I want to happen, but not how. And it’s a fight scene with six characters and a dog. Some of the characters (and, sadly, the dog) do not survive. But how to get there in a believable way?

To finish the draft of this scene, I need to get the choreography right, which means putting characters in the right locations or, in the case of hand-to-hand fighting, making the movements believable. And there is motivation and personality: what will each character do in response to other characters’ actions?

Some scenes seem to write themselves. I hear the characters in my head and I know what they’ll do. Not this fight scene. Thus, only 900 new words this week for a total in the draft of about 96,000 words.

I hope to finish writing the fight in the coming week. After that, there will be more new territory, events that were roughly sketched out three years ago in the outline but now might not make any sense. I wonder if the easy writing is behind me. Maybe it will be all squeezing water from stones from now on?