Sorry I haven’t been around for a while. I mean I’ve been here every day plugging along on the project, but haven’t had, or really, haven’t taken, the time to work on the blog. I’ve been clearing a big backlog of links to interesting blogs and resources in the meantime, but that’s not the main point of this blog. The main point is to document the half-practical, half-emotional journey of working on a novel.
A couple of weeks ago I realized that while the writing itself has been going well enough, there are other aspects of the project that need attention. Certain characters need some changes, but overall I’m not too concerned about characterization. Symbolism, which I’ve heard some people tend to tack on as an afterthought, isn’t a big problem for me since this particular story/story world was designed with heavy symbolism built in at several levels from the beginning. I’m not worried about settings either, really, though that starts to get into the meat of the problem. The areas that I need to back up and spend some time on, as far as I can tell, are plotting and world-building, in that order.
World-building for me, on this project at least, is more a question of taking a bunch of ideas I’ve accumulated over time and fleshing them out, and then working them into the action. There’s a certain amount of window-dressing, but I don’t like pretty things for their own sake, so I’m trying to take the time to make sure they’re important to the story in some way. At the very least, the conditions in the story world need to contribute to the feel of the book, the mood of a given scene or set of scenes. Desperation or determination, hopelessness or hope, mystical beauty or eldritch (thanks, HPL) horror. And a certain amount of symbolism as well, though it’s easy to overdo it in this area (red sky means blood was spilled this night? Legolas, seriously…). So there’s work to be done that I dread somewhat, and I don’t have everything in place (or in mind) that I want, but I’m pretty confident about it.
Plotting is a different story.
For me, plotting is not a natural thing, like putting words together for emotional effect is (more so, anyway). Early on I didn’t worry about this at all, and found that things tended to work themselves out at certain levels. For example, at the macroscopic level - the overall mythos, the prevailing conditions in the world that drive large-scale events in a partially guided fashion - that seems to have come together pretty well, and will be refined in the iterative drafting process. And at the micro level, the stimulus-response transactions, the actions of a character within dialogue or an action sequence: I’m pretty okay with things at that level. But like the story of the kleptomaniac little blonde girl and the three large furred omnivores (who for some reason live in a house despite the dander issues and a huge tolerance for cold), it’s the thing in the middle that matters.
To be continued…
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