Writing in Reverse

Island Rush

It was a sloppy story and I knew it from the beginning.  It didn't have any organization at all and I was fine with it.  Because every time I would go to Wattpad and start a new chapter, it would write itself.  Details and ideas would just come to me as naturally as it was becoming to type.  If I tried coming up with ides for a future chapter before actually writing it, it wouldn't work.  I would get distracted.  I needed to be in front of a computer, ready to type, for the ideas in me to flow.

There were a couple things I knew I wanted in the story from early on but not many.  First was that they would go down to the plane to try to get supplies.   Second was that if they were going to get off the island, it would be from a huge fire. Besides that, nothing else was really planned. 

From the start, I knew I wanted them to somehow get stuck on the island.  That was kind of clear with it being a story about them being on an island.  But how?  Plan crash.  It was the most realistic way in my mind at the time was a plan crash for them to get stranded on the island.  When you start to try to come up with any alternative ways, you aren't left with many.

Of course, it was difficult for me to come up with a reason for the plan crash though.  I kept trying to think over why it could have happened, what was the reason it went down, what will happen to make this happen...?  I realized though that it was alright if I didn't have an answer yet.  Because Janice wouldn't have an answer, why should I?  After all, I was looking at it through her and the main character doesn't need to know everything.  In fact, in my opinion, it's better if you don't have everything figured out when the characters don't.  It makes your character's more relatable when you don't have an answer just like them. 

The same went for the fact that she didn't know what was going on in the real world.  She didn't know if they were looking for them, if they weren't, what her dad thought... so why did I if she didn't have the answer yet.  It was irrelevant so far in the story.

It was also okay that I wasn't an expert in survival.  It made it more realistic for the characters considering they weren't experts either.  Of course, I got ideas by doing some research - like how to make a spear, how to get coconuts from a tree, what an island would supply as resources... but other than that, the rest of their 'survival skills' I just came up with. And it honestly wasn't that hard.  There are tons of options on how to go about doing something when you are clueless to begin with.

It was an important aspect of the story to me to show them actually surviving.  And I figured it would be perfect to demonstrate that if they were constantly traveling at the beginning.  That was why I wanted them to get lost after they first got there.  So they could travel every day and learn how to deal with themselves, deal with their environment besides just settling down like they wanted to.  Janice had to run away so it gave them a chance to experience the threat of no water, no shelter, and actually facing that together before they actually were able to find the creek again.

By this point, I discovered another issue I was having with my writing.  The fact was that I was always repeating myself.  I was worried that I wasn't getting everything across clear enough to the readers because it was very important for me to show everything in exact detail.  And if it wasn't coming across like I wanted it to, I wouldn't be satisfied with myself. So I tried explaining things more than once, describing situations in other words, going on forever about the same thing so not only do people remember what is happening in the scene but they see it as it was intended. 

I didn't know how to shake the habit and I'm sad to say that I was unable to fully achieve doing so by the end of the book.  It was one of the huge mistakes among many I would later discover in the story.

By the time they found the lake again, I realized just how long this story has been going on.  I mean, I had no clue when I started this how long it would be.  But I didn't think it would take this long to write what I had, with not much progress between the characters surviving.