My Writing Journey: "The Ghost of Forsyth Academy", Part 1

A Little Context

There's nothing I love in this world more than writing, but I have trouble finishing projects, and I don't believe I've ever completed a project I felt was good enough to be queried.

However, I have some projects in the pipeline that I have high hopes for. "The Ghost of Forsyth Academy" is one of those projects. But at 40,000 words into my first draft, I've hit a bit of a plateau. I thought that maybe if I chronicled my journey, I'd be more motivated to actually finish the draft and move it to the editing stage. My goal is to have a complete first draft by the end of the year.

"The Ghost of Forsyth Academy"

So this story was inspired by a dream that I didn't even have - it was a dream my father had years and years ago (I think I must have just started high school, so we're talking like a decade). Since it wasn't something I came up with, coming up with a plot and motivations and figuring out some of the details was a little hard, which might be why it took me a decade to get this far into a draft.

At some point, I had a brilliant breakthrough about names - I took them all from the American side of my family tree - which led to a pretty clear idea of the setting - my family is from Georgia, so obviously the story has to be set there.

The actual breakthrough came a little later, when I figured out who the murderer in my murder mystery was and what their motivations were for killing the titular ghost. After I figured that out, writing the actual story got a whole lot easier.

So what is "The Ghost of Forsyth Academy" about? Basically, a girl from the West Coast is suddenly placed in an elite boarding school in Savannah, Georgia. She's a fish out of water, and to make matters worse, she's having nightmares of a ghost. When a body is found in her room, she feels an obligation to solve the murder of the ghost visiting her dreams. I think it's a pretty good premise, although I've been struggling with the audience I'm writing for. This doesn't feel YA, but it doesn't particularly feel adult either. That might be a problem for later.

Aside from audience, I'm facing some other obstacles. The reason I've been so unmotivated this last week (besides some crazy life circumstances) is that I noticed a pretty major plot hole. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so having a plot hole in my story really bugged me and made it hard for me to keep moving. I've kind of bandaided the plot hole for now, so hopefully that helps with my motivation.

I'm also worried that my story is boring. I love mysteries, I love trying to figure out who the murderer is, but I feel like it's so obvious in this story that no one is going to be intrigued. Maybe I'm saying that because I've known since I started writing who the murderer is, but I really can't shake that fear. I also feel like there's a lot of introspection, and I'm not sure if it works or not. I guess I'll see when I have other people read the story and hear their thoughts, but it does have me worried.

Anyway, I set a 50,000 word count goal for this project, and like I said, I'm at 40,000 with I think around 20% of the story left to write? I've got three or four big scenes left, so things are close to being wrapped up, and I'll probably even exceed my word count goal. Once I do that, I'll print it out and shove it in a drawer until I feel removed enough from the project, and I'll start the editing process.

But for now, one thing at a time. I have got to finish this first draft before December 31.