I’m going to kill off my main character in Listening to the Lost Voices. This is going to be a tricky operation as it will be rife with symbolism and meaning, and he deserves to die well.
I also have no clue yet as to how to go about doing it.
And thus I will place it in my “pondermatic” where it will incubate and develop on its own. This works for me. When I am not certain what to do with the story, into the pondermatic it goes and maybe in a few hours or days I have a glimmer of what happens next.
While the pondermatic is incubating the plot point, I will work on another story. I want to write, and don’t want to waste the desire. This is insurance against the dreaded “writer’s block,” which I mentioned in The writer as a god. I suppose I could do others things, but I am afraid that my new-found dedication to write is still fragile, and so I will write even when I am clueless about the current main thing I’m working on. I’ll just turn to something else…
To give credit where credit is due, I got the term “pondermatic” from my friend Sean McGaughey, the “Ductape Guy” over at For the Sake of the Song and Catholic Roundup.
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I like the term “pondermatic.” I’ve found that quite a bit goes on in the mind’s ‘back office’ while we’re doing something else at the ‘front desk.’ I’ve had connections and ideas for a work in progress pop up while talking, watching TV, whatever.
Writing something else while letting the ‘main project’ percolate sounds like a good idea.