My writing decision making session yesterday was not as successful as I had hoped. I struggled. Why does that surprise me so much? This is the step I keep avoiding, of course it will be hard. I expected it to be easier somehow just because I am devoting more time to it.

I brainstormed on setting and a magic system filling roughly 20 notebook pages with ideas but as the day wore on I kept circling around the key decision I had to make – choosing the main character.  As the flow of ideas petered out, I returned to the book “The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing” hoping for some advice to keep me going. It quickly became clear that I had to get that character figured out to move forward. How can I choose an appropriate crisis, if I don’t know who is experiencing it?

I want my protagonist to be Dakota St. Clair the space pilot because she’s cool, but I can’t figure out exactly who she is or how she fits into the world I have started. How does a 17 year old girl end up piloting a space ship? Shouldn’t she be in school? How could she ever afford a ship, let alone earn the respect to use it commercially or in any other fashion? Is she a magic user or a blank or something in between? I felt like I had accomplished nothing, and wondered if I was going in the wrong direction all together.

I started questioning all the decisions I had made up until this point. Should I include magic in a science fiction story at all? Shouldn’t I just remove the space ships and focus on the fantasy elements instead? Maybe it would work better if it wasn’t a young adult novel and Dakota could be older. Is she even the right protagonist? This sounds very familiar. I have to get out of this habit of reaching a challenging point and scrapping everything to start over.

Despite the fact that I did not come up with a premise and my efforts yesterday felt unsatisfying, it is unfair to call it a failure. I just haven’t succeeded yet. I think persistence is key here. I will sit down again today to keep going. I will hang onto the bits that are working and then keep building from there.