The Obvious

Sometimes the obvious thing is the hardest thing to see. My sister took 8 years to marry her husband when the rest of her family figured it out in about ten seconds. Well today I had the most stunning revelation of my young life and looking back on it, I realize how obvious it should have been all along.

Over the past fifteen years of working on my Novel (including the last three when I was actively writing it) I must have had 20 different first chapters. I could never, for the life of me, get that first chapter that combined all the elements into one place. So much of what I wanted the story to be just couldn't come through. As a result, even to this day, the story starts off slow and gradually builds steam. As of today, that's going to change.

For 9 months I've been worrying about the first chapter. While I edited and rewrote this novel, I worried that the first chapter would ultimately not grab the reader, that it was too slow, and that it took too long to get started. Beyond affecting the sales of my novel, I worried that it would never get past the publishers who would read the first few pages and then put it down. But today, I came up with a brand new first chapter idea that is so stunning that I can't wait to get home and start writing it.

You see, it has nothing to do with the story at hand, and yet everything to do with it at the same time. Its exciting and thrilling and dangerous and will leave you wanting for more. And then it will linger with you as you wonder what the hell it has to do with the rest of the story. I'm so happy.

The thing is, I wrote this particular first chapter stuff ten years ago as part of a screenplay for a movie I never finished. The only reason it has anything to do with the novel at all is because I needed some background filler for the main character and I stole it from this unfinished script. Here it is, 3 years after I started writing the novel, and I'm just now getting the correct first chapter - material that I had all along.

I feel like Pharoah, looking out over an entire Kingdom filled with dead first born children and saying to myself, "Maybe God wants me to let the Hebrews go?" I don't know how it could have been more obvious all along.

Okay, back to work...