Wiktory.

[mrissa]

You know the boring chapters you have to get through to make the plot go, but you really hate to write?

I didn't put any of those in this book.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You know the boring chapters you have to get through to make the plot go, but you really hate to write?

Er, no. But that might be an aspect of how I plot books (read: by the seat of my pants).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lucky you, then.

If I plot by the seat of my pants, I have years of revision ahead of me to make it comprehensible outside my own head. (Ask me how I know....) So one of my goals in outlining is to avoid bits that will be interesting to the reader but boring as hell for me to write -- without making the whole thing less interesting to the reader.

I think this time I've succeeded pretty well.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That may have come across as sounding more self-congratulatory than it was in my head; sorry.

The way you plot and write is an alien planet to me. I didn't successfully finish a novel until I made myself stop bouncing around and writing it out of order; now I can only do that if I have multiple povs, and then I still have to write each one in order. Otherwise, I end up splicing the fun stuff together with boring things just designed to get us to the next Cool Bit, and the Cool Bits end up coming out of nowhere and failing to be grounded in what came before. (The first novel I finished had some bits written out of order; I had to go back and completely scrap the Passionate Declaration of Love scene and redo it, because it read like a standard Passionate Declaration of Love, rather than what those characters would actually say. I didn't know who those characters were well enough when I wrote it the first time.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have one short story I've written completely in sequence. One. It was in '00, and I've never been able to do it since. (Pieces of under 400 words are occasionally short enough to be sequential -- but mostly not.)

And I totally get having to rewrite things because you didn't know the characters well enough at the time -- but sometimes I need to get to know them in Chapter 17 before I know them well enough to write Chapter 5. I think it's just thoroughly different wiring. I would be very surprised if there were any individuals who could write the same kind of book either in order or out of it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Ah, but unless Chapter 17 describes something that happened before Chapter 5, it isn't part of the foundation the characters grew out of. I might need to polish Chapter 5 to lead more effectively toward Chapter 17, but that isn't the same thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But Chapter 17 may come from something a good deal more deeper/fundamental to the characters than Chapter 5.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Of course! But that deeper/more fundamental thing is either going to be somewhere in Chapters 1-16 (whether it happened then or was revealed then), or somewhere in the backstory. If I write 1-16 first, I'll have had more time to realize that really important thing exists. It may still blindside me partway through Chapter 17 (that happened, very literally, in writing Doppelganger, only it was Chapter 20), but none of this would be helped by writing that one first; I'd probably only end up writing 17 without knowing about the important thing, and then I'd have to rewrite it once I realized.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My time is not the characters' time, is I think the succinct version of why it doesn't work this way for me. My time is also not the readers' time. There are three sets of time in writing a book, writer's, reader's, and character's. I think for some writers, their time is always the same as the reader's time -- they have to write it in the order in which it will be read. And for some writers, their time is always the same as the characters' time, so they have to write the things that happened first before the things that happened next, even if there's going to be flashback structure from the reader's perspective. But it doesn't work either of those ways for me.

Do you prefer to learn history linearly (Tudors before Stuarts etc.)? Or are you happy with a mosaic approach there?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It depends on what kind of history I'm reading. Some things need to go linearly; others don't. I prefer biographies to be more or less linear, in that they can loop around a bit as needed (bringing up past or future details as they become relevant), but they should have a clear overall motion from early to late. A history of London, on the other hand, can bounce around more if it's organized by various topics -- one chapter on the livery companies, maybe, and another on plague.

In writing, my time is much closer to characters' time than anything else, because I'm following them through the story. Midnight Never Come is being my first experience with substantial flashback, and I think it's going to give me hives. Fortunately, I think the flashbacks are going to all be about people other than the protagonists.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

People talk about how writers are mean to their novels, but novels are mean to their writers!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Are they ever, she said feelingly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"More deeper." I are a writer. Sheesh.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Mind you, the downside to my approach is that, while I do it in order, I have little to no idea where I'm going sometimes. ("By the seat of my pants" also translates to "out of my ass.") So it's bad when I'm jogging down the path of the plot and suddenly realize I've run up against the edge of a fogbank.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That was the fun part of my one sequential story, for me: "Huh, I wonder what this is about. No idea. Well, I'll put it down and go do something else now. Oh, here, this is what happens next! And after that? Not a clue. Hmm. Well, maybe tomorrow." I think I could do it that way in part because I was not attached to that particular short story getting finished at any particular time -- I was doing other things, so it could be an interesting side project without the stress that would come about from not knowing what on earth I was going to put in my novel the next day when I sat down to work.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, sometimes, definitely.

But sometimes it's very actiony and people praise it to the high heavens later, and I'm still bored writing it. So I'm trying to avoid both categories, boring-to-reader and boring-to-me.

Thankfully, there is significant categorical overlap.

[grndexter.livejournal.com]

Doing a late stage rewrite/edit on my space opera (V.1 WT = "No Credit") I eliminated three loooong paragraphs this AM that told in DETAIL how the ship's quantum-jump drive worked. It ended up like this:

"The quarks or zitgurgs, whatever they are, are going so fast around their primary particle that…"

(And then the other character held up a flipper to stop her.)

MUCH more understandable.

;-D