Had a scene collapse mid-chapter and had to rewrite on the fly

Was writing a thriller set in a rain-soaked Seattle alley, and my protagonist's phone call got interrupted by a real-life thunderstorm that killed my wifi. Ended up typing the whole conversation into my phone notes, voice-to-text with terrible typos, and cleaned it up later. Anyone else have tech fail at the worst possible creative moment?

2 comments

2 Comments

hannahw3013d ago

and honestly what nobody's talking about here is how much better handwritten notes can be for scenes like that. I keep a little pocket notebook in my jacket for exactly this reason. Phones die, wifi drops, voice-to-text butchers everything. Paper doesn't care about thunderstorms. Plus there's something about scribbling by hand that forces you to slow down and actually hear the words in your head. The typos and chaos of tech fail are real but sometimes going completely low-tech is the real hack nobody tries.

johnflores13d ago

Honestly just lean into the chaos next time. Turn that voice-to-text mess into the character's panic or paranoia, make the tech failure part of the story instead of fighting it. Ngl that real storm interrupting was probably a better twist than whatever you had planned anyway.