How did your Long Run go? I wrote 4800 words by the end of the day--mostly crap, but there are some tidbits of potential. Most writers have to churn through some shit to get to the good stuff, that's normal.
"The first draft of anything is shit."Today's drill is on interactions, or 'stealing from Peter to pay Paul.'
— Ernest Hemingway
Everything that happens in a story affects more than one character. It is the nature of literature. If a good story is truer than if it really happened (paraphrasing Hemingway again), then the action should be woven together like a tight mesh. If you pull on one thread, that pull reverberates through the entire mesh--every thread.
Nothing can happen in isolation.
What does that mean to your story? I can't find who to attribute, but someone said 'Don't ever let two characters sleep with each other unless there's someone else who's going to be devastated by that.' If a character decides to eat lobster for dinner, we need there to be a reason he chose lobster and that lobster needs to affect another character--like the restaurant owner who's storing a dead body next to his lobster tank. So the waiter goes back there and finds it.
And if you rob Peter, what happened to the money? As a former Economics major, I can tell you that in real life, if you want to understand a stream of actions, follow the money. Is it the same with your book? Money should follow a path that helps to reveal plot and character. It's a powerful story element. USE IT.
Pick a page of your novel and relate one action of that page to another character in the book. Write it out as backstory, but you may find that one piece of that AMPS up the tension in your book.
Good luck, Private.
