Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
Jul. 24th, 2005 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBad night, including a nightmare about a cobra that woke me up at 7:30. And the weather is utterly inhumane. Could someone come get rid of this invisible lead overcoat for me? Because I'm tired of dragging it around.
This morning, I came to the realization that Chapter 11 needed to be Chapter 11 and 12, because there was just Too Much Shit Going On (that's a technical term). So I made the split, and have gotten 15 pages into what is now Chapter 12, and--possibly because I made the split and therefore have the spurious but helpful feeling that there's suddenly way more room--have come to the further and unpleasant realization that I ducked a crucial scene in the last draft.
This is what happens when I become fond of my protagonists: they tell me they don't want to talk about something, and I let them get away with it.
That's a metaphor, of course. The truth is, it's going to be a difficult scene to write, and the bone of contention is something that can't be resolved at this time, and in my frenzy to reach the end of the book, I just ... elided it neatly in a paragraph that now, with some distance, reads completely like a hand-wave.
Yes, I just brought an elephant into the living room. Please ignore it.
"There's always consequences," Spike tells Xander at the beginning of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That's hard to face, both in real life and in fiction. And the dangerous thing about fiction is that, if you let yourself, you can finesse it, slide around it, displace those consequences or simply make them Not Happen. The even more dangerous thing about fiction is that your readers may very well be happy with that solution, and the positive feedback will not encourage you to change. You're happy, your readers are happy ... This is escapism in its pernicious sense, and it leads to stories that are not true. (Fictions can be true or false, just as facts can.) It's like the White Witch's Turkish Delight.
Becoming a better writer, like becoming a better person, is about facing the consequences.
This morning, I came to the realization that Chapter 11 needed to be Chapter 11 and 12, because there was just Too Much Shit Going On (that's a technical term). So I made the split, and have gotten 15 pages into what is now Chapter 12, and--possibly because I made the split and therefore have the spurious but helpful feeling that there's suddenly way more room--have come to the further and unpleasant realization that I ducked a crucial scene in the last draft.
This is what happens when I become fond of my protagonists: they tell me they don't want to talk about something, and I let them get away with it.
That's a metaphor, of course. The truth is, it's going to be a difficult scene to write, and the bone of contention is something that can't be resolved at this time, and in my frenzy to reach the end of the book, I just ... elided it neatly in a paragraph that now, with some distance, reads completely like a hand-wave.
Yes, I just brought an elephant into the living room. Please ignore it.
"There's always consequences," Spike tells Xander at the beginning of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That's hard to face, both in real life and in fiction. And the dangerous thing about fiction is that, if you let yourself, you can finesse it, slide around it, displace those consequences or simply make them Not Happen. The even more dangerous thing about fiction is that your readers may very well be happy with that solution, and the positive feedback will not encourage you to change. You're happy, your readers are happy ... This is escapism in its pernicious sense, and it leads to stories that are not true. (Fictions can be true or false, just as facts can.) It's like the White Witch's Turkish Delight.
Becoming a better writer, like becoming a better person, is about facing the consequences.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-24 03:53 pm (UTC)And it was an entirely unexpected cobra, so it would actually make sense for it to be an interloper.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-24 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 08:37 am (UTC)