Killing Diane

I’ve meant to kill Diane just about every day for the last week now, but I keep finding ways not to.

Back in June, my neighbor listened to me complain about how I was losing my mind with boredom amid the first lockdown and about how I never get around to doing any writing and pointed out the flawed logic there. Since then, I’ve been writing this story on a daily basis. With 2-3 exceptions, I’ve written a page a day since then.

I’ve had the story knocking around in my head for ages. Probably decades. So, this is not coming out of the blue. I have the overall story worked out: I know who’s going to start the story and who’s going to be standing at the end. The details do surprise me from time to time, like I hadn’t expected to give the main character a girlfriend, but it seemed natural at one point. And lines that I’d never thought about seem particularly appropriate when I sit down to right. There is an overall roadmap, but I am surprised by how much of the writing is on-the-spot improvisation.

But, pretty much since I first had the idea for this story, I knew that Diane was going to die. For the story to unfold the way I want it to go, Diane has to die. This is not negotiable for me and my story.

Yet, as I write every day, I keep finding ways not to kill her. Right now, the characters are, essentially, doing a drug bust. They drive up in their car, run down a short hallway, and arrest the bad guys (there’s more to it than that). You’d think this would take me a page, so Diane could get into that room and get shot. But first I opted to have Diane stay in the car (she’ll join them in the room later). Then, even though I describe the hallway as short, I managed to take 3-5 pages to get the group from one end to the other. They’ve been running since January 16, people. Now they’re in the room, I’m finding every way I can to draw out the moment until Diane joins them in the room and then, once she gets there, who knows what I’ll do to draw out the final moment.

I wasn’t aware I was doing this at first. I think, maybe on the second or third day or trying to get down the hallway, I thought to myself that I was drawing this out. Now I’m pretty sure I’m doing it on purpose, because even though this is just fiction, I’m not wild about letting something that I created die.

It’ll ruin the story if I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t approach it with trepidation. When you create a story like this, you create a universe. I’ve created one where people have superpowers. I can tell you this though: No child is going to die of a brain tumor in my universe. I have that much control.

It is odd. I’m sure writing is therapeutic for me. I imagine it gives me back some control, especially in this nightmare of a pandemic. But, even with that control, Colin keeps slipping into my universe and makes sure things don’t quite work how I’d planned. It’s how things are.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this story. I’m going to see what happens if I send it off to a publisher or an agent, just because I want to know if I can do this. But first I have to kill Diane. And she’s not in the room yet.