A Whole Lot of Nothing

I took my own advice and changed the direction of my novel. In fact, I had a long writing session yesterday of about five hours, which gave me the opportunity to really flesh out my new idea. 

That turned out...awful.  

If you recall, originally my main character was packed up, ready for the drive back to her hometown, when her long-lost love interest showed up unexpectedly. That led her to staying in Nashville, which led to basically nothing happening. So, I changed it.

Now she is back in her hometown, and yes, I did a little time skip, but really, was I going to detail every mile she traveled? I've been very strict about avoiding scene jumps, but sometimes you've gotta do it. I decided that she needed a job that provided tips, yet was simple enough that even she could perform it. So she began work as a food delivery driver. (Waitress is so overused.) That was fine as background, but something still needed to happen to keep the story alive. 

Well, nothing did. 

My problem is, the entire premise of the novel is that my main character is a singer, so music has to be there in some form. In changing the story's direction, I ended up in the exact same spot. In the original scene, she moved in with her love interest and started looking for a job, when he came home from a gig one night and told her that a guy he'd played with suggested that the three of them form a band. Cool, I guess, but MC has already been in three bands, so did I really want to add another? What else is there to say about that?

But now in the new version, it's her cousin who wants to get their original band back together. Which, again, leads me nowhere. I spent too much time yesterday talking about the preliminaries of hiring band members and rehearsing and other totally uninteresting details. That would be fine, but there needs to be a payoff. I can't seem to come up with anything music-related that veers from the norm. At least in the first scenes of the novel (when MC was still with her original band) she suffered a lot of indignities; terrible bookings, the audience ignoring her, their agent telling her she should consider changing the group to a tribute band. But now she's tasted some recording success, short lived, so she can't return to the humiliating existence of a striver. 

She's got nothing new to do.

And readers would be bored to death.

Once again, I feel like I've wasted an entire writing session. I don't have anyone to brainstorm with and I'm obviously incapable of coming up with an original idea. Someone once said, even the worst idea in the world can make for an interesting story if it's written right, but I'm having a hard time believing that. 

I kept about two or three lines from that first trashed scene, and I don't think this one will yield much more. I wrote a couple of humorous side scenes, which was my only burst of true inspiration all day, so I might look for a way to keep those. I wish someone would invent an app that one could plug details into and it would offer some suggestions for where to take things. Much like AI, its responses would be worthless, but they could spark an actual good idea.

All I know right now is, if she's really going to jump into another band situation, something out of the ordinary will need to happen. Maybe someone will get electrocuted by a loose wire (I'm kidding). Or maybe it'll be deja vu and a record label rep will "discover" her again. It'll be just like Groundhog Day, only different! (again, kidding.)

I'm stuck. 

And it's hard to see things getting better.