How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Today, while I was proctoring an exam, I wrote the ending of Electric Boogaloo. Let me back up - in addition to my day job as an attorney, I also teach for The Princeton Review. I usually teach LSAT prep, but today I was proctoring an SAT exam, which is always interesting because the people in the room are the people who I hope will one day read my books. So I view it as sort of research. But I also view it as boring. The SAT takes approximately 6 million hours to take, and the only thing worse than taking it is sitting through it without having my whole future rest on it. There's not even anything at stake! (I'm sure the people taking it would kill me if they heard that.) Anyway, I usually take my computer so I can write during the exam. Even though I am supposed to be working on TNP, I was in an Electric Boogaloo mood today, missing the characters, so I finished a scene in that manuscript. But after I finished that scene, I was sort of stuck. I've always known h...

One of the things I like about the internet is that it allows authors to show people things that never made it into the final drafts of books. A lot of times, there are good reasons for not including these scenes (like, they suck?), but it's interesting to see them nonetheless. It's like the extras on a DVD - you can look at those extras without polluting the author's final version of the text. In the book that I'm working on now, there are a LOT of those extras. This book has gone through several incarnations over the years. There was a version in which there were four sections, each of which was told from the point of view of another character. It was a disaster. Interesting (at least to me), but seriously a disaster from a book perspective. Also, when I started writing, I wrote a lot of scenes that I wanted to see that didn't actually fit in anywhere once the plot finally crystalized. That blows, because I really like a lot of those scenes. They're ...