A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Forty-Eight

 Work is going slow, still, but I am making progress.  The story I have been writing is coming along, though I am still writing it at a snails pace right now.  I am getting towards a place where I understand it, and I think that it is going to speed up soon.  It is best, I often find, to just trust the story to go and find a way forward.  I have a sense of what I think is going to happen, a general concept of a plot, but I am also thinking that the plot I am considering is one best handled without the character being fully able to comprehend the events, in a sense.  I want the reader to have an understanding of things that are not accessible for the character, and that are not stated directly in the story.  In achieving that balance, I think the approach of not considering the plot so much, of writing from within the characters experience and allowing things to shape around that, makes a lot of sense, and it also keeps me open to the possibilities of the ways a piece of writing can change, taking an unexpected turn, or just not wanting to be the intended story.  It is not a bad thing, is the magic of such work, at times, that a character or the story itself may have intentions and desires that become integral to respect.  A story is not an inert thing, is not waiting to be made into anything, but often seems to have notions of what it must be, and not listening to that is, at least for me, a route to failure.  I find, however, taking it slow and allowing a story to set the pace and direction is often far more powerful as a methodology.