Palouse Writing Project - 8. June 2007 Progress Report

I’m trying to stick to my goal of writing one page a day, come hell or high water, with some success—at least most days.

While I’ve written bits and pieces of the earlier scenes in the story, I’ve spent much more time on the key scene near the end of the novel between David Stirling, Micah’s boyfriend and life mate, and Betty Kingman, Micah’s deeply religious mother. Betty’s character is still in flux; I want her to change and accept David, but I don’t want it to be easy for her. So I keep having her maintain her antipathy toward David, sympathetic as he makes the David-Micah relationship sound. I rewrote one scene where she softens toward David and kept her still anti-gay.

David’s character gets more and more settled as I write it. He is becoming one of the stable characters that will change little throughout the novel. He has been out since his mid-teens, his parents have accepted his homosexuality, he is comfortable with it, and I think he is going to act with a lot of maturity from his earliest appearance in the novel, which is not yet written. In the crucial scene with Betty, I am making him calm, dispassionate, but very much determined to keep Micah as his life mate even though it may destroy his ability to win over Betty.

I know I’m avoiding what I consider the really difficult part of this story: the rise, fall and resurrection of Micah, the music prodigy. But I’m telling myself that if I can define the personalities of the characters around him, maybe it will be easier to write Micah’s story.

So, I plug away with my one-page-a-day goal. So far, these pages remain largely unedited and unconnected, but I plan to write a lot more pages before I do any serious re-reading and editing.