Writing whine
Sep. 9th, 2008 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienIt is now slightly thereafter ...
But that wasn't what I wanted to post about.
I'm feeling somewhat disenchanted with the Behemoth novel at the moment. It's been stalled at just over 100K words, give or take a few brief false starts, since May or thereabouts when the heat and the travel started to make it hard to keep to routine, and I can't rouse myself to much enthusiasm for finishing it. There's still a lot that needs to happen in between now and the ending, certainly more than 20K worth; hero and heroine have only just met, after a long online acquaintance, for one thing.
The trouble is, I have a horrible feeling that the words so far are not only the wrong words, but describing entirely the wrong subset of events. There's a multi-planet-spanning civilization on the verge of economic collapse in the aftermath of a war a generation ago, a tragic Ahab-esque Captain, hyperspace pirates and enigmatic aliens and a peevish semi-sentient computer ... but most of what has actually happened on stage so far seems to involve messing about with thumb drives and cellphones, drinking coffee, and trapesing through endless corridors. Once I get to the end, I'm going to have to go right back to the beginning and try to find the right bits to put in instead.
It might have been more efficient to start with a proper outline, but nothing happened when I tried to write one. If I didn't have three more or less coherent novel-length objects lying around, I'd be starting to think I wasn't cut out for this novel-writing business at all.
But that wasn't what I wanted to post about.
I'm feeling somewhat disenchanted with the Behemoth novel at the moment. It's been stalled at just over 100K words, give or take a few brief false starts, since May or thereabouts when the heat and the travel started to make it hard to keep to routine, and I can't rouse myself to much enthusiasm for finishing it. There's still a lot that needs to happen in between now and the ending, certainly more than 20K worth; hero and heroine have only just met, after a long online acquaintance, for one thing.
The trouble is, I have a horrible feeling that the words so far are not only the wrong words, but describing entirely the wrong subset of events. There's a multi-planet-spanning civilization on the verge of economic collapse in the aftermath of a war a generation ago, a tragic Ahab-esque Captain, hyperspace pirates and enigmatic aliens and a peevish semi-sentient computer ... but most of what has actually happened on stage so far seems to involve messing about with thumb drives and cellphones, drinking coffee, and trapesing through endless corridors. Once I get to the end, I'm going to have to go right back to the beginning and try to find the right bits to put in instead.
It might have been more efficient to start with a proper outline, but nothing happened when I tried to write one. If I didn't have three more or less coherent novel-length objects lying around, I'd be starting to think I wasn't cut out for this novel-writing business at all.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 12:45 pm (UTC)John Braine, in his how to write book called, appropriately enough, How to Write A Novel uses a method that might fit your situation. Namely he writes an exploratory draft, then works out what the story is really about and produces an sysnopsis/outline, then he re-writes the novel according to the outline because by then he knows what the important scenes really were.
Though on thinking about what you've said above, perhaps all the large scale stuff is merely background and the real story is small scale?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 04:08 pm (UTC)The scale issue is awkward. In a sense it's a story about two families shattered by a wartime incident, but there's a much larger issue that will get incidentally solved when the family members find each other again. And my tragic captain can't seem to decide whether he minds more that he lost his son or lost the war ...