I've been stuck for a few days with New Brave World.

I'm writing this blog to try to sort through the problem. You don't mind, do you?

I sort of know where I want it to go, but I'm not sure how to get there--or more to the point, how to get there in an interesting way. I have a squad of soldiers in an isolated place and I need to kill them off one by one, until only the main male protagonist is left, naked and near death, so the main female protagonist can save him.

But once I start down the road of killing them off, it will become pretty obvious to the reader that's what I'm doing.

I asked Linda and she said to make sure I flesh out all the victims first, so that their deaths mean something, which is good advice.

The second possibility is having something else going on at the same time which adds to the mystery. But that may be something that occurs to me later.

I think what I'm going to do is something I've never really done before.

I'm currently 44 pages in. I think I'll go back and add at least a paragraph to each character as they are introduced to delineate their characters. This is something I never do; it falls into the problem of telling, not showing. But showing is a very long and delicate process, and with telling you get that information out there right away. In truth, I've begun to notice that lots of writers do it and that it doesn't really bother me as long as it is subtle.

I'm willing to try new things, and this will be a bit of an experiment. If the descriptions don't work, or slow down the story, I can always go back later and cut them down.