The completion of the main plot

Late last night, I wrote to the completion the second of the three main story arches. The passage collides together the intentions of the protagonist and the antagonist. Thereby, it's the completion of the main plot; it's the most important knotting of threads in the book. At the moment, I think I managed well with it.

I've been agonizing with that passage for about seven months. First, my ideas for it didn't satisfy me. I rejected my original idea very quickly. I've seen that particular scenario played out too many times in fantasy books. Then I came up with a flood of stupid ideas. For a while, I even contemplated dropping the antagonist into a pit in order to give the person quadriplegia. At the end, I came up with the idea that is now in the file. That happened about five months ago. Why it took me that long to write it?

According to my experiences, it's good to let ideas stand for a little while. Most ideas can't survive that period. The thrill I initially felt fades away. However, if an idea survives the test, in most cases, it's a usable idea that gets even better as it gets older. So happened with the idea for the conclution of my main plot. During the last three days, as I was writing the idea down at last, I had numerous supporting ideas with the main one and a few popped up during the writing, too. Surprises don't stop, it seems. In addition, the main plot had evolved into something even more thrilling than it was back then, fife months ago.

Surprising myself

Today, I wrote the first of the three main story arches in my book to the conclusion.

Finally.

Once again, despite the draft I'm following, something surprising happened. I was writing about my main character Travis' struggle to understand the motives of his partner. It was my intention to make him ponder about the dislike he and his partner feel for a certain side character and thereby come to the conclusion whether to accept his partner's motives or not. However, I wrote about Travis recalling his memories from the very beginning of his time with his partner. Because of them, he came to understand the fault in his own thinking. The end result was the same, but the way I took was a route that I never had even thought about.

It was much better way than to one I had previously decided to take.

Where do these ideas come from? From my subconscious, that's my guess. But, that doesn't tell me much. How do the ideas rise from the subconscious level to the conscious level? I have no idea, but my best ideas seem to appear like this.