Carter Hall and the Plethora of Prologues
Oct. 25th, 2009 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaLast night I wore real clothes and ate real food and spoke audibly. Hurrah for me! Today I am still fighting off the remnants of this virus, but I have it on the run, I'm almost sure. I'm going to be taking it easy as much as possible the next few days, because I am warned that this one can get nasty towards the end. No harm to just a bit more tea and reading under the afghan.
The problem with allowing as how Carter can have a prologue if he wants one is...the same problem with writing anything else with Carter, really. He tends to run away with things. So saying, "Arright, boyo, how does it start?" promptly hands me something like five prologues. I find this excessive. I was not convinced that one prologue was not excessive. Still, when I have brain to do it I am writing them all down, in case I need Carter's Church OfBaseball Hockey Speech at some later point, or Carter's Briefing On Janet And Tam, or Carter's (Completely Wrong) Theory of Why the Queen of Air and Darkness Chose Tam To Begin With, or Carter's (Only Slightly Less Wrong) Theory of Why It's Never The Defensemen or like that. All those things will go in their little files, and maybe for once I will have the "bonus materials" sorts of things people talk about. Or not; it's entirely possible that all the rest of that stuff will go somewhere else in the book than the prologue, or in short stories.
But the thing is, mostly when I write things that get cut in later drafts, they are the wrong things. I look at them and say, "No, no, that's not how it happened," like if one of your relatives was telling a story from your trip to Louisiana only you remembered very clearly that it was when you were in Maine instead. And if the things actually happened and need cutting and redoing, it's because I wrote them badly. So I almost never come out of this whole process (at least so far) with material that is substantially correct as written but does not belong in the final draft. Maybe Carter will do that for me. We'll see.
I am also trying to keep him very thoroughly away from the words "else the Puck a liar call," because I am a bit scared of what will happen if someone lets him at them. And since he, y'know, doesn't exist, someone would have to be me. So. ("Like hell all is mended," says Carter in my head. "Think but this my ass.")
Also, the Wild won, and Cal was back on the ice, and do we regard this as a coincidence? We do not.
The problem with allowing as how Carter can have a prologue if he wants one is...the same problem with writing anything else with Carter, really. He tends to run away with things. So saying, "Arright, boyo, how does it start?" promptly hands me something like five prologues. I find this excessive. I was not convinced that one prologue was not excessive. Still, when I have brain to do it I am writing them all down, in case I need Carter's Church Of
But the thing is, mostly when I write things that get cut in later drafts, they are the wrong things. I look at them and say, "No, no, that's not how it happened," like if one of your relatives was telling a story from your trip to Louisiana only you remembered very clearly that it was when you were in Maine instead. And if the things actually happened and need cutting and redoing, it's because I wrote them badly. So I almost never come out of this whole process (at least so far) with material that is substantially correct as written but does not belong in the final draft. Maybe Carter will do that for me. We'll see.
I am also trying to keep him very thoroughly away from the words "else the Puck a liar call," because I am a bit scared of what will happen if someone lets him at them. And since he, y'know, doesn't exist, someone would have to be me. So. ("Like hell all is mended," says Carter in my head. "Think but this my ass.")
Also, the Wild won, and Cal was back on the ice, and do we regard this as a coincidence? We do not.
