Those twenty pages on the left took one solid month to write. That is because they don’t include the thirtyish pages that were written and discarded in the attempt to create this chapter.
This is a truth: Sometimes you think you know a character well, and you keep writing from his POV, and it goes nowhere because you are not hearing your character’s directions, or you are mishearing them. On this trip you’re taking together, you drive yourself down dead-end streets again and again.
Very often, for me, the way off those streets is to scour my surroundings for objects that will make me turn right, turn left, do a U-turn, anything to find a road into the story my character’s trying to tell me.
An old novel… a hippie van… a hotel towel, discolored by time and decades of storage, that was once taken from the backstage dressing room of a pop band as a memento of a wonderful day. All of it led to a different character who said, “Let me help you. I know him. Listen to me since you’re not hearing him.”
And it worked.
Bonus: The drawing is one I modified from a coloring book for an imaginary tour. It put the fun back into what I was trying to write.