I have a book that I've been working on since I was sixteen. The good news is that it's always getting better and I'm going to begin shopping it around soon to agents (yay!). The bad news is that it's a book I started when I was sixteen. It's taken A LOT of work to get it into a readable format. The basic story has always been strong (that's why I've continued fussing with it rather than shelving it like so many other failed projects), but the writing was...well let's just say I didn't pay attention in high school English as much as I should have done.
So now that I've struggled through the mire of mucky grammar and the sands of shifting tenses, I have come to the point where I get to fine tune. Right? And then I realized that the whole second act (the longest and, some might argue, the most important) took place in an apartment...well, more specifically a single room of the apartment. The main character, Erick, looks out the windows and has interactions with the immediate surroundings, but he never leaves that room.
Problem.
He is in hiding so it makes sense for him to be laying low, but the one room, I feel, gets really dull after a while. There supporting character, Sarah, is there with Erick and she gets to explore a bit more, but the story doesn't follow her. We only get to hear about what she's seen. I tinkered, I tailored, I soldiered on, and in the end, I knew I would have to use a spy to force Erick out of the apartment.
And that's what I did. It added drama, pushed Erick forward in the plot and gave him additional motivation to become who he needed to become.
Have any of you ever had similar problems where a character's gotten stuck in a rut? Maybe it was like my situation where the story was good but the location was growing stale?
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