Monday Noodles
Jan. 31st, 2005 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI've barely even thought about writing for the last week; time to get back to it before the momentum dissipates entirely.
Last night I happened to glance at the first chapter of the novel-length-thing I started at 19. It baffled me for a while, because I couldn't work out what was wrong with it. The prose is bland but correct; the POV stays firmly with one character, probably by accident; the action traverses three universes and introduces two major characters in addition to the POV. So why does it feel so weak? After a day of thinking about other things, a possible answer came to me just now as I was putting away yesterday's laundry. The big problem is simply that the POV character is a cipher. He has no past, no passion, and no personality. And that, I suspect, is why The Firebird Gate is doomed to stay in the virtual trunk.
The Behemoth plot is starting to struggle back out from under the load of work-related stuff that got dumped on it last week. At this stage, it's rather like playing with pentominoes* or some such puzzle, pushing the pieces around, flipping them over, trying to get them to fit. These puzzle pieces, however, are made of soapsuds; grasp them too firmly and they disappear. I've known for a while that the Captain of the eponymous ship is carrying a load of guilt over a starship disaster in the war; more recently, I realized that there was no need to have two such disasters, which means that he and the heroine's parents must have been on opposite sides. I'm still playing with the implications of the choice of who was on which side. Try this here, then that fits there, and that one ... but no, that only leaves a hole the shape of a piece that I need somewhere else.
*A tiling puzzle in which the pieces are the twelve possible combinations of five squares. I tried googling, but the first few links all seem to be on-line implementations, and I don't need to get into that kind of distraction.
Last night I happened to glance at the first chapter of the novel-length-thing I started at 19. It baffled me for a while, because I couldn't work out what was wrong with it. The prose is bland but correct; the POV stays firmly with one character, probably by accident; the action traverses three universes and introduces two major characters in addition to the POV. So why does it feel so weak? After a day of thinking about other things, a possible answer came to me just now as I was putting away yesterday's laundry. The big problem is simply that the POV character is a cipher. He has no past, no passion, and no personality. And that, I suspect, is why The Firebird Gate is doomed to stay in the virtual trunk.
The Behemoth plot is starting to struggle back out from under the load of work-related stuff that got dumped on it last week. At this stage, it's rather like playing with pentominoes* or some such puzzle, pushing the pieces around, flipping them over, trying to get them to fit. These puzzle pieces, however, are made of soapsuds; grasp them too firmly and they disappear. I've known for a while that the Captain of the eponymous ship is carrying a load of guilt over a starship disaster in the war; more recently, I realized that there was no need to have two such disasters, which means that he and the heroine's parents must have been on opposite sides. I'm still playing with the implications of the choice of who was on which side. Try this here, then that fits there, and that one ... but no, that only leaves a hole the shape of a piece that I need somewhere else.
*A tiling puzzle in which the pieces are the twelve possible combinations of five squares. I tried googling, but the first few links all seem to be on-line implementations, and I don't need to get into that kind of distraction.