To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not to Yield

The Literary Lab had a post recently about making each word, each sentence count in a novel. There was some argument in the comments about whether this was possible, or even desirable.

One interesting accusation was that novelists who try to do this are secretly short story writers who haven’t figured out the difference between 1000 and 100,000 thousand words.

It may be even worse. It may be that novelists who try to do this are secretly poets.

At times, especially if I’ve been off my meds for several days, I think of my novel as a ballad or epic of the ancient sort, in heroic rhyme. And why not? Much of the source material, the original epics upon which modern fantasies base their structure, were book-length poems.

When I become stuck in my prose, and everything I type is ugly and repetitive, when all beauty and simplicity escapes me, I fall back on poetry.

Seriously.

I write a scene as a poem. Sometimes even with aliteration and rhyme, though often just with unrhymed metered verse. I write it one line, one word, at a time. I let the rhyme and meter decompose through layers of editing. I rearrange and deconstruct and reconstruct until the bedrock poem is there only as a skeletal structure, disguised by less ornate prose. Consistantly, beta readers rave over these as my best passages–and want to know why the rest of the prose is so unispired and infantile by comparison.

Well, now you know why.

Should I do this with every single scene? I am not sure. There’s the danger that taken to extremes, stacking too many such scenes, purple prose could accumulate to toxic levels. But more to the point, I just finished a scene like this and found that, after four hours, I had written… 400 words.

Still, if it takes an hour to write a 100 decent words, isn’t that better than spewing 1000 words an hour if those words are worthless and ugly? If they must be re-written again and again regardless?

What about those scenes which errupt like volcanoes, far too fast for poetry, but hot with plotty goodness and juicy character tension?

Ah, at least, though, hot and fast or cool and slow, I remember at such times why I love writing.

When Do You Lose Your Voice?

I’ve been on both sides of the beta read.

In the following hypothetical situations, I’ve also been the reader making vague or specific suggestions. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll discuss it from the writer’s side today.

I’ve experienced what it’s like to have someone tell me: “This paragraph [scene/chapter/last third of the book] doesn’t work. You could probably cut about 10,000 useless words if you tighten this.”

My response: That’s great, but how? If I knew which words were useless, I wouldn’t have included them.

Then again, the beta reader may rewrite the five-page scene where the hero and heroine storm the castle as, “They ate ice-cream.”

My response: Wtf? That isn’t what I wanted to say, or how I would have said it.

However, frequently I do accept a beta reader’s suggested changes, especially of clunky sentences, even scenes, wholesale.

Suppose what I had written was originally, “Laboriously, yet also suddenly and instantaneously the bullet kaboomed and zoomed out of the gun muzzle on the gun she was holding and pointing at him, hurtling through the air like a speeding bullet, which in fact it was, until it began to pierce his broad yet vulnerable chest, fragmenting bone and hurting a lot.”

The beta reader suggests, “She shot him.”

And I think, “Brilliant! This captures the whole thing in just three words! Why didn’t I think of that?”

But then a part of me looks at the stripped down version, and wonders, but has it lost my voice? Did I do more than put out the fire on the roof, did I kill the spark in the lamp?

Do you ever worry about losing your voice during rewrites?

Bestiary

http://bestiary.blence.com/

The World’s Worst Food

I needed a disgusting, yet believable food for a scene in my book. A previous scene already covered the dietary needs of cannibals, and I needed this to be even worse than that.

Little did I know there were so many contenders.

After some thought, I decided to keep the Icelandic name for the chosen dish, an indelicacy which has been declared “the world’s worst food”: hakurl — putrified poison shark.

So what does hakarl taste like then? It tastes like crying. It tastes like broken promises. It tastes like the Lord God Almighty ripping the Bible out of your hands and saying, “Sorry, this doesn’t apply for you. I think you want “Who Moved My Cheese?” It tastes like the Predator wading into a Care Bears movie and opening fire.

Sadly, I won’t be able to use this description of it, much as I would love to.

Hakurl Draft

After some thought, I decided to keep the Icelandic name for the food featured in one scene in my book:hakurl.

So what does hakarl taste like then? It tastes like crying. It tastes like broken promises. It tastes like the Lord God Almighty ripping the Bible out of your hands and saying, “Sorry, this doesn’t apply for you. I think you want “Who Moved My Cheese?” It tastes like the Predator wading into a Care Bears movie and opening fire.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3895653

Hearing Back From Beta Readers

Another of my fine beta readers sent comments back to me on The Corn Maiden. This is for the version prior to my current revisions, so I expected to hear about problems.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Your head can tell you that you want hear what the problems are, you need this information; your heart, however, just wants to hear affirmations. So I opened the email and attached file with rumble-belly dread. How bad is it?

Actually, the criticisms were extremely consistent with what other beta readers said.

(1) To paraphrase: Why is every single character, including your MC, unable to see the Completely Obvious Plot Point? Is everyone in your story world really Too Stupid To Live?

(Answer: Er… not really, no. Just the author!)

(2) The pacing drags in places. (I hope to find out more about which scenes were boring when I read the line-edit comments).

This beta reader also pointed out two new things:

(3) The hero is too perfect; he hasn’t enough flaws to seem human.

(4) The opening scene in the story promised one thing, but the main character plot arcs delivered something else; if not for the set-up, the story would have been fine, but after the expectations set by the opener, the story disappoints. Ouch.

Finally, the beta reader made an interesting point, not about how things were wrong, but asking about a change.

(5) There are three major story threads in the book: the main story, a subplot in the present, and a subplot in the past. Each thread, though intertwined with the others, is independent enough to not need the others. This reader found the subplot in the past to be the strongest, and wanted to know why I didn’t just make it a book in and of itself, or, alternatively, cut the subplot in the present entirely. Undeniably, either of these actions would take care of my word count problem!

I’m hoping the present revisions address issues (1) and (2). Issues (3) and (4) are both related to the fact (the beta reader recognized the problem), that this book opens a series, and not as a stand-alone novel. I’m not sure what to do about this. My original plan was to go the traditional route and give the first book in the series a “safe” ending, a happy-for-now-ending. That just didn’t work. There’s no way to end it without a cliff-hanger. And if the reader senses that the real story is just beginning, they’re right. (It’s comparable in this way more to The Fellowship of the Ring than The Hobbit.)

So I agree with 4 of the 5 criticisms. However, I disagree with (5). Yes, I could have three short, stand-alone novels for the price of one. (Don’t think this hasn’t occurred to me!) Yes, it would help with my word count if I eliminated one or even two of the subplots. However, the three plots are like strands of a braid. Though they could each work alone, I believe they are stronger together; together, they subtly change the meaning of the whole, making it more than the sum of its parts. At least, that is how it is meant to work, how it works in the books I most admire.

The story is an epic, after all. I find it’s hard to convey epic with a single-strand story.

In a story with multiple plotlines, it’s natural that some readers relate more to certain characters’ story arcs than others. As long as different readers prefer different plotlines, this is not a flaw, but a strength. I’ve already noticed that some of my beta readers favor certain characters over others, and — this is the good part — they aren’t the same characters. This is how it should be. If every reader universally panned the same subplot, it would be different, and I would have to consider deleting or seriously revising that subplot. I still wouldn’t eliminate subplots altogether, however.