I’m currently working out a timeline for my characters– what happens when.  Just realized I was “plotting.”

Heh.

~

Since I split my story into two simultaneous novels (We’re on round three, if you’re coming in late) I’ve been juggling what happens when, and trying to work out tricky elements like travel times and (Bluah) geography, making sure the groups’ encounters happen within the same calendar.

The idea is that I don’t need to write #2 at the same time, but I sure as heaven need to know what’s happening when or the next novel will be a scramble to fit rather than a natural fit.

Since my new division, the split has settled and whatever part of the story that “comes” to me generally nestles into one or other of the pieces and moves it forward nicely.

My biggest challenge with time (I’m not directly dealing with it yet, but I’ll have to soon) is how to deal with “jumps” in time to skip over the nothing-important-happening bits.  I have several options I’m considering, but haven’t yet decided what fits best.

It’s made me notice how many novels and movies take place in one un-interrupted chunk of time, and look for intelligent transitions.

10 pages.

Since yesterday afternoon.

Like I said, I wanted just to “upgrade” the storyline and work on craft in a later draft, but this latest chapter was so dated it was obsolete.  I might have saved five sentences out of the 10 original pages.  And I still ended up with 10 pages of chapter in the end.

Whooo.  That felt like a marathon, but it was only the 10K.  I’ve still got longer chapters to clean up.

I have just reached (in my last writing session) the portion of my novel that I have not “touched” since NaNo ’06.

The story has changed significantly since then.

• New characters have been born and others have sunk into the background.
• The timeline has been significantly compressed (from years into months)
• A war has been “reduced” to a kidnapping— for now
• Whole personalities and motivations have been changed

And I’ve become a better writer.

Shew! In two years I’d hope so!

Seeing the difference is a little intimidating because it brings up a new question: Do I re-write?

As in, do I line-edit and try to “upgrade” what I wrote two years ago, or do I review what happens and start again to tell it with what I know now.

I am beginning to think I’ll have to do the latter to make the writing as good as possible, but it does feel excruciatingly frustrating to let go of so much work.

But then, maybe I won’t have to let it all go…  I’ll decide at the end.  For now I’m simply reading through and updating the plot details to it’s current form.  The larger things that need to be re-worked, e.g., transitions, cartography (God help me.), I’m just making notes of at this time.

Call me slow if you must, but my inherent desire for clarity and openness has been one of my biggest stumbling blocks in learning one of the core elements of novel-writing: the art of concealment.

I’ve been creeping toward this realization little by littles, but it wasn’t until I was re-reading a (cut!) conversation between the prince and his retainer (Torb was telling Rickard exactly what he thought of R’s lady-friend) I realized, Prince Torbjorn would *never* talk this way.

The reality is very few people talk this way.

Not only do few people take the time to analyze what they think or why they’re doing something, even fewer verbalize their conclusions.

And while I’ve recently resigned myself to a main character that is similar to me in some ways (it is just a first novel, after all), this particular tendency of mine is one way that I feel none of my characters could believably behave.

“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.”

–Mark Twain

I’ve mentioned before I’m always trying to get the short-summary coherent.  Here’s the latest incarnation that’s on my Infant Novel page.

A young woman risks marrying a “beast” in order to escape her abusive step-mother.  She disenchants a good man, but her happily-ever-after is interrupted when her new husband must undertake a quest, leaving her alone to face new monsters.

Makes the guy sound a bit like a jerk, but I haven’t thought of a way around that yet.  He leaves knowing other friends will be looking out for her when they can, but since it really does come down to Linnea alone, that detail didn’t seem relevant for the short-summary.

And to answer another question: no, I’ll not be doing NaNo this year.  I will be spending my writing time closing the holes in this story.  There are sections, closer to the end, where I haven’t worked the original manuscript since NaNo 2006.

I have whole attitudes and motivations that have changed since then (primarily because the time-frame telescoped from 3+ years down to months) so I have a fair bit of updating to do.  Fortunately I am blessed with a patient friend and husband who will let me “think with my mouth open,” so I already know where I want take the update when I get to it.

Going into the “swamp” and letting my characters fight monsters and each other is a section of the story I’ve started in each version and got stuck on each time.  It’s very close to working now.

This excerpt shows more of the tension (and, I hope, character) of the competing captains and their prince.

Continue reading »

But not all that original…

Still working at the novel a couple nights a week.  Added 11/1200 words each of my last two sittings and that’s made me feel better than I did (I’ve been mostly editing the new draft till now, and began to wonder if I was capable of an original thought).  Latest scene involved a nice battle with three tree-sized snakes and purple blood.

Fun stuff.  Only I haven’t figured out the significance of the blood.  {shrug}  I have time.

The unoriginal part is that I have a conflict of standards.

I want to be amazing and brilliant and moral and entertaining… but maybe I can only be two of those at a time.

Well, patient readers, The novel has entered re-vision #3

This is (again, I suppose) very exciting to me.

I mentioned I was close to an ending, and was rightly encouraged by that proximity.  The difficulty (and nearly zero-productivity) following that awareness was simply an amplification of issues I’d been having since deciding to break the story into a series of sorts.

Several people counseled me to finish it anyway, just to have the… settledness of having something totally done, and I tried to follow this advice (remember that high productivity the other night?).  But even though I really liked what I wrote (when I have a lot to tell, the quality seems above average) I didn’t feel like it advanced the main story.

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The original reason I was drawn to this tale (I believe I’ve mentioned at some point) was that it centered on a main character who got married part-way through the story.  I loved having a story that showed a working marriage and its themes of commitment and cooperation.

By breaking the story shortly after the marriage (my original plan once I stopped thinking of this as a single book), I was thwarting my own purpose and having to add material to places that were not as important to my original goals.

~

This third round uses material from both the previous drafts; in fact, my “starting place” on this draft is 207 pages and 53,734 words.

Using character (rather than time) to narrow the scope has allowed me not only to use material I have already written, but to tell the whole story in one place.

There is definitely still enough story to think about a second book, but it is disconnected enough from Linnea’s story that I feel it could be it’s own book without overlapping.  (It mainly follows the story of Runa, the character I quoted yesterday and mentioned in this post as one of my favorites.)

A reasonable comparison is the separate story-lines in the pairs of “books” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: discrete adventures taking place in the same time.

I sketched out some chapters for Runa’s story and copied over what’s already written that fits in that new framework: 79 pages.

Can’t say yet whether it’s enough  to be it’s own story (too distracting to think about, honestly.  I’m trying to stay focused here). but it’s nice to reassure myself that the good work I’ve done isn’t *all* in the cut bits file.