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I made it in my sleep. I wonder what it does.
Chapter 8: 6,844 words
Lighter by about 3k, which is all to the good.
Writing Mélusine, The Virtu, and The Mirador has been an interleaved process of the sort that could only have been straightened out with the judicious use of a time machine. I wrote The Shadow of the Mirador (yes, terrible title, move along please, and remember to keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times), then Labyrinths Within, then rewrote TSotM into Mélusine and The Virtu, and am now rewriting LW into The Mirador. Think of it as manuscript leapfrog, and if you get dizzy, put your head down for a second.
The rewriting process has taught me unspeakable (in the Lovecraftian sense) amounts about how to write. And so now, as I'm tearing LW/TM apart and putting it back together again, I find myself asking two questions over and over again:
All too often, the answer to #1 is "Nothing." Characters are interacting, but to no purpose. If I take the scene out, the book is not lessened. (And hence the 3k in Chapter 8 that got the axe.) And since the novel is not a hot-air balloon, it does not need to be carrying ballast on lift-off.
Someone once said (the way I was told it, it was Vernor Vinge, but I've heard other writers attributed, too) that every scene needs to do at least two of three things:
When I was first told this, and dutifully wrote it down (I've still got it on an index card in turquoise ink) it seemed like trying to do six impossible things before breakfast. Now, it seems obvious, like a reflex. Any scene that is going to pull its weight has to be doing more than one thing at a time.
The other thing is that those three things can be the same thing. If you can get that, you're golden. Since I'm a heavily character-driven writer, for me #1 and #3 go hand in hand, and when I'm asking myself, What does this scene need to do? that's generally the kind of answer I come up with. This scene needs to establish Thaddeus's motivations for what he's going to do in Chapter 16. (The next question, of course, is How? and that's the one that most often takes me into the Great Grimpen Mire.)
And, yes, my writing process is that meta. It's become that way from theBataan death march educational experience of rewriting TSotM, which was a daily ritual of looking at a scene and trying to figure out what I'd thought I was doing, what I'd actually done, why it wasn't working, and what I now needed to do to make it work.
I'm going to be very interested to see, when I finally get to write Summerdown, what this process is going to look like when done in the logical order instead of ass-backwards.
Lighter by about 3k, which is all to the good.
Writing Mélusine, The Virtu, and The Mirador has been an interleaved process of the sort that could only have been straightened out with the judicious use of a time machine. I wrote The Shadow of the Mirador (yes, terrible title, move along please, and remember to keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times), then Labyrinths Within, then rewrote TSotM into Mélusine and The Virtu, and am now rewriting LW into The Mirador. Think of it as manuscript leapfrog, and if you get dizzy, put your head down for a second.
The rewriting process has taught me unspeakable (in the Lovecraftian sense) amounts about how to write. And so now, as I'm tearing LW/TM apart and putting it back together again, I find myself asking two questions over and over again:
1. What is this scene doing?
2. What does this scene need to do?
All too often, the answer to #1 is "Nothing." Characters are interacting, but to no purpose. If I take the scene out, the book is not lessened. (And hence the 3k in Chapter 8 that got the axe.) And since the novel is not a hot-air balloon, it does not need to be carrying ballast on lift-off.
Someone once said (the way I was told it, it was Vernor Vinge, but I've heard other writers attributed, too) that every scene needs to do at least two of three things:
1. advance plot
2. provide background
3. develop characters
When I was first told this, and dutifully wrote it down (I've still got it on an index card in turquoise ink) it seemed like trying to do six impossible things before breakfast. Now, it seems obvious, like a reflex. Any scene that is going to pull its weight has to be doing more than one thing at a time.
The other thing is that those three things can be the same thing. If you can get that, you're golden. Since I'm a heavily character-driven writer, for me #1 and #3 go hand in hand, and when I'm asking myself, What does this scene need to do? that's generally the kind of answer I come up with. This scene needs to establish Thaddeus's motivations for what he's going to do in Chapter 16. (The next question, of course, is How? and that's the one that most often takes me into the Great Grimpen Mire.)
And, yes, my writing process is that meta. It's become that way from the
I'm going to be very interested to see, when I finally get to write Summerdown, what this process is going to look like when done in the logical order instead of ass-backwards.
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I outline my stuff to hell and gone, and it really helps keep me focused on the Three Impossible Things, as you enumerated above.
This is not to say that outlining doesn't have drawbacks, but so far I find it's helped more than hindered.
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They're one of those YMMV things to the nth power.
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Quite so.
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Much like the critique "More emotion! More description!" is a single repeated demand?
I'm not yet at the stage where I can do all three at once, at least not consciously -- let alone make them the same thing. Possibly my next crafty lesson to focus on. (After dialog in verse, that is.)
---L.
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My current repeating revision note is "More tattoo!"
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I really loved reading this post. It was very helpful for me as a fledgling writer. I have a terrible time getting from plot A to plot B and so on. I know the more I write, the better I'll be...but it can still be so frustrating!
Anywho...I really enjoy your works and am happily devouring The Virtu as we speak. While I was reading it the other day I realized there wasn't a LJ community for your books. So I created one. The
Good luck with the editing!
PS - I hope that you like the LJ community idea.
Cheers!
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This was a fascinating post to read, as one of the things I really admire about your writing is how you've managed to write a complete (and brilliant) novel while still leaving *so* many questions about the characters unanswered. I'm an aspiring writer myself, and one of my problems involves pages and pages of dialogue that don't go anywhere plotwise, but I love for character-development reasons...
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*Blink blink*
There's such a thing as doing this process in a logical order???
It's not normal to go through three novel titles, cut all the wanking useless scenes, *still* expand to two books, contract the story forcibly back to one book, then totally rearrange the order of scenes?
Because even when I outline, I do at least some of that. Even relatively new projects have gone through some interesting convulsions during gestation. (At least with the Labyrinth story, they've all happened to and within the outline...so far.)