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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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