All right bloggie-poo, I realize I have been somewhat neglecting you. I will now minister to your vanity by updating you, although the further inflation of your fatheadedness will be somewhat tempered by the realization that I am only doing this to procrastinate on writing a paper for my music class.
How's that for a sadistic passive-agressive no-more Mr. Nice Guy quarter on a string screw you vending machine blow to the self-esteem?
No, I'm not angry. I'm pretty okay right now...just winding down after a day of work. They finally gave me something to do! This is good. The bad bit is, I am not at all familiar with the development environment, so I don't know how to figure out what I don't know. But I'm getting there, so hopefully that will resolve itself.
Oh, depravity. I have stooped to using Internet Explorer because I have two gmail accounts open at the same time, so if I stick to Firefox I can't edit this blog at the same time as checking my other email address. Ah, peste.
Meanwhile, I am not naming any names, but someone I am thinkig of right now needs to update her blog. You will know who you are, because the minute I write these words you will, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, think of a purple hippo with the word 'DESULTORY' painted in huge pink letters on her stomach. That is my telepathic mind-modifiying awesomeness in effect.
So. Lastly, a quick update on the writing front:
[insert snarky picture of tired animal making sardonic/sarcastic face]
I am on break. That's it. I am clearing my head before I start re-planning the dregs of what was once NaNo10. It has exploded in my face and I feel like I am making no progress even though I suppose I am. Curse my verbosity! That's why it takes me 3000 words (approximately ten pages, for my non-obsessively "page-from-word-count"ing friends) to write what was originally supposed to be a single to two or three page prologue. Now imagine what my pen/fingers do to a whole chapter. Yes. I have a deplorable habit of going off on thought or dialogue tangents, in order to explore an interesting idea.
I lied.
That is technically true, but if it was so easily defined I could just catch it right there, write it down for later, and continue writing. The truth is, I start from a single-sentence outline of a scene, and I start writing it, but then I find out that in order for the reader to understand what just happened, they have to know the context around it. Then I spend time writing the context (not simply exposition, but things that actually happen). Sometimes even the context spawns context. The end result is that I find that my initial scene was really somewhere in the middle. But then the problem is that I now have a whole bunch more of the beginning to write, plus I now have the rest of the original middle, and the end to write, and the new stuff disrupts the flow of the old stuff, because the original inception of the plot, the pivotal beginning event, must wait on some beginning scenes, which completely throws off the flow.
Dilemma: to write relevant beginning scenes, and completely replan the book, or jump right in, but no one understands why this is so important because knows what is going on?
Ugh.
Haha, I'm on it :)
ReplyDeleteAnd here is a very long discourse on plot from the perspective of someone who has never even tried to write a book:
Personally, I don't like it when books start off with something like "ZOMG this is such an important moment! He just did WHAT?!?! quiver!" and you don't even know who the characters are. It just seems like a lot of work to figure out why you should care. (This is mainly from the perspective of touchy feely realistic fiction books, though.)
Also, maybe this is because I'm not really a science fiction/fantasy person, but I'm personally put off by prologues. If you take Sabriel as an example, I was bored by the prologue (roiling! baby! vaguely-defined magic!) even though it was just a page or two. I was much more interested by the first chapter, when I was like "Oh cool, it's a teenage girl! She's so badass! And OMG SHE CAN BRING BUNNIES BACK FROM THE DEAD!" And THEN, the author starts talking about her dad and her school and the bells and suchlike.
So, as to your dilemma, I guess you have to consider whether people would actually care about the context at that point in the story. I don't mean that you should cut the context, just that maybe you could find a way to work it in somewhere after we've already met the characters and figured out their conflicts.
And again this is just me, but I prefer books when they start off with human interest (like the first Harry Potter book, or the first chapter of Sabriel) as compared to important plot things (like the "Riddle House" dream in Goblet of Fire, or the prologue of Sabriel.)
I don't mind a little drama in a prologue, like the Riddle House, especially since it was important to know what happened in that bit, but really...it would have been far cornier had she really made that Harry's dream sequence. I think if there's one thing that annoys me more than monsters rising from a pit of darkness, a strange powerful character being killed for no reason by a force of darkness, magical babies, etc...it is poorly executed dream sequences. Especially if they're all in italics.
ReplyDeleteAs for never having tried to write a book...JulNo is write around the corner (pun intended), and it's in summer. You have no excuse.