A wall. Of books. AKA a bookshelf.
100 pages? That’s loads right? It is. It’s at least 30, 000 words (and trust me I’m constantly looking at the little numbers in the bottom right of the screen). The first thing I did when I sat down to write Call the Shots was pick up a book (Greg Hurwitz’s Orphan X if I recall), count the number of words on the page and then bump up the text size in Word until it roughly matched. I wrote one page in Word and it was like one page of the book. This both gave me a rough idea of where I was and also scared the shit out of me. Even a page is a lot. And you’ve got to make it a decent page. And then you’ve got to write over three hundred of them?!
But once you’ve got going suddenly things click into place and those pages are just flying by (I’ll do a post about how I know I’ve actually got a decent start). Then with every book I’ve ever written something absolutely terrifying happens – I get to around page 100 and completely stall. I’ve got my plot, and my ending and my characters and it’s all ticking along. I’m punching the air every day after banging out my word count. I’m scrolling author Instagram feeling very smug. And then I get to page 100 and that’s it. EVERYTHING stops dead. The 100 Page Wall.
For some reason I can’t drag a single character past that point. An echoing chasm opens up between page 100 and the unwritten end of the book. The air goes unpunched. Author Instagram is full of sons of bitches who’ve managed to finish their book. I begin to fundamentally doubt everything I’ve come up with.
It happens every, single time. I don’t learn.
So what is it about the 100 Page Wall that is so hard to get past and what can I maybe learn and pass on after hitting that wall four times in a row?
Firstly, those 100 pages are not a waste. Thanks to them I now know what works and what doesn’t. The plots and characters who have AMAZING openers but don’t go anywhere. The illogical twists which looked great in the outline but suddenly don’t make any sense (I’ll do a post about how I outline – it’s probably the most important part of getting the thing finished). A lot can be fixed with a few simply tweaks. Every time I’ve gone back to the start there’s been a lot to salvage in those first 100 pages. But that leads me on to my next point –
A lot of it is complete waste. I’ve had 100s of pages of characters who simply didn’t work. Plots which were so convoluted even I’d forgotten what was supposed to be happening. Often I can tell I have no idea where this is meant to go. I start over describing the weather, talking about what clothes people are wearing, the colour of their car paint-job. Anything to get past that 100 Page Wall. But it’s always the same. The denser the prose gets, the more I know I’m going to have to rip it up and start again. Wind Up Dead started off being about an academic couple with a dark secret. That secret being I didn’t really know where it was all going. Pay the Price had a huge subplot about gun-running that simply ran out of road. Even Settle the Score went a long way down having Malton in prison for most of the book before I realised the reason why I was stuck was that my main character was also stuck – behind bars.
So I’ve bitten the bullet, junked 100 beautiful pages, turned off author Instagram and sat back down to try and do it all over again. How do I not simply repeat the same mistakes? Well there’s one thing that I’ve found is a great help in breaking through that 100 page barrier. Something which seems hopelessly obvious now I’m writing it out. But something that I only found out through a lot of trial and a lot of error.
Have something MASSSIVE happen around page 100. In Call the Shots Danny Mitchum appears around page 100. The big bad with the melted face. Page 106 of Wind up Dead and Ani Delgado is nearly choked to death in Lesha’s café, sealing her fate. It doesn’t really matter what. In Pay the Price it was around page 100 (actually page 91) that Keisha entered the Sentinel Rehab facility and began her plot to abduct Emily. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as something throws a kink into the story and starts you off with some more knots to untie.
I spend so much time making sure a book launches with a huge bang and as many spinning plates as possible, it’s easy to forget how long those plates need to keep spinning for. To stretch the metaphor to breaking point, they don’t just need to spin, they need to spin faster and faster and faster until they fly off and shatter against the wall. The even that shatters the 100 Page Wall should make those plates spin so fast and hard that they can keep spinning for another couple of hundred pages.
So when you get to page 100 and it all grinds to a halt, don’t despair. Take a step back, see what works, what doesn’t and then devise that massive event that will keep you going all the way to the end.
You wrote 100 pages, you can write 100 more.
Settle the Score is out on the 27th of June. It is longer than 100 pages.
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