The Mirador

[truepenny]

Chapter 1: 7,698 words

1,405 new words today, and you may all blame matociquala for the fact that I am experimenting with giving Felix PoV in this novel.

---

Speaking of matociquala--and Felix--we've gotten into a discussion over here about Felix's speaking voice, for those who are interested.

Bear also has a really good post about what writers mean when we say a book is broken.

Comments

[libskrat]

A question for you, since you are smarter than I am about these things: Is LeGuin's The Other Wind broken?

I think it is (despite a few heartbreakingly gorgeous passages that I love to pieces), and I can kinda sorta articulate why I think it is, but I'm interested in your perspective, and that of your perspicacious commenters.

[larryhammer]

Not that I'm a penny of any form, but I think The Other Wind is broken to roughly the same extant and reason that The Word for World is Forest is.

If that makes any sense.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Not having read The Other Wind, I really can't say.

[libskrat]

Oops. My bad. Well, don't let my opinion stop you -- you'll miss out on the really beautiful bits, if nothing else.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I've read the post re: broken books and still don't get it. I think some of it is subjective and some of it is semantics. A book works or doesn't work for a writer or reader (or editor, I guess, too).

Personally, I don't like using the word "broken" in that context. If it's my book/ms, I prefer to think that something's not working and I need to figure out why. I keep the focus on that point or place where I feel things stop working. To me, a standstill doesn't mean something's broken, only that it stopped for the moment. Sure, I'll say I had to fix something, which implies something broken, but again, it's just semantics what we call things. Which might be why not everyone understands what's meant when someone uses the word.

When I read, it doesn't matter if a book works or not, only if I'm liking it. A book can work fine but if I'm not enjoying it, there's no point in continuing to torture myself with it. ;)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, the first rule of talking about writing is, if it doesn't work for you, don't use it. It's all subjective--not like there's a standardized lexicon or anything--and if a particular terminology doesn't suit you for whatever reason, then you'll do much better for yourself to come up with your own descriptor.

otoh, semantics are important. Because we can't talk about things we don't have words for.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

"Well, the first rule of talking about writing is, if it doesn't work for you, don't use it. It's all subjective--not like there's a standardized lexicon or anything--and if a particular terminology doesn't suit you for whatever reason, then you'll do much better for yourself to come up with your own descriptor."

"otoh, semantics are important. Because we can't talk about things we don't have words for."

True on both points, but it's important in a discussion to know how everyone is defining something that has both connotations and denotations. This seems especially true for writing. I've been on message boards where conversations got heated and confusing til folks stepped back, defined their terms, and discovered instead of disagreeing, they were saying essentially the same thing, just using different terms for it.

In this case, it's part terminology or descriptor, but it's also a matter of is something really broken or is it simply that it doesn't work for a given reader or a given writer. So, I could say it's just not working for me as a reader, even a beta reader, while the writer thinks it's broken because it's not working for me, yet another beta reader could think it works fine.

So, whose opinion matters or matters most? I figure the writer, followed by a potential editor/publisher. :)

[marith.livejournal.com]

This has nothing whatsoever to do with broken books, but before I forget, have you seen John Scalzi's offer to interview authors on his AOL site (http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004185.html)? It sounded like good publicity.

</ random attempt to be helpful>

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer!