Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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I'm not sure how much more I'll get done today, so I thought I'd put this up now.

I revised at least 8 scenes, then lost count. Some needed minor adjustments, some needed major overhauls. I drafted two new scenes to round out the first 11 chapters. I drafted the first scene of chapter 12 and revised scenes that are now the 4th and 5th scenes in that chapter. I am now finished with revising all the holdover scenes from the previous draft. Every other scene I work on now will be a new one.

While it isn't unusual for me to reach a point in the second half of a story to start figuring things out and jotting notes in the file for upcoming scenes, some of them being placeholder types -- need a scene for G here kind of things -- I have actually outlined the last third or quarter of the book. Everything has fallen into place. There are a few places where a single scene note might actually represent 2-4 actual scenes, but I'll know when I go to write them.

For a while, on Saturday, I noticed a disturbing trend beginning. Because I was now working with an actual plan, because I knew almost everything that was going to happen, it felt as if I was trying to stuff the scenes I wanted into the story, in some sort of inevitable order, instead of letting them evolve. I had a sense of forced storytelling and losing the element of surprise. This pointed out to me a major pitfall if I ever did try to outline a story ahead of time, not likely to happen since I'd have to write such a detailed outline to figure out each scene that it would resemble a thin draft. But the realization was a new one for me and something I now know to keep in my conscious thoughts while writing or revising.

I see the book having 15 chapters, so I can see I'm nearing the end, and I mostly know that ending, though not the very last thing that occurs, the last words, that sort of thing.

WordPerfect suggested this spelling correction: Grisha (the protagonist) --> Geisha. Well, as a friend said when I told her, that would be a much different book and probably not one I wanted to write. She was right. And I just ran the spellcheck on Blogger and Blogger suggests "grassy." I think I like WordPerfect's suggestion better.

Since I updated the outline as I go outline, I thought I'd do the scene breakdown again:

• Ch. 1 -- 4 scenes
  
• Ch. 2 -- 12 scenes
  
• Ch. 3 -- 5 scenes
  
• Ch. 4 -- 6 scenes
  
• Ch. 5 -- 9 scenes
  
• Ch. 6 -- 10 scenes
  
• Ch. 7 -- 12 scenes
  
• Ch. 8 -- 7 scenes
  
• Ch. 9 -- 7 scenes
  
• Ch. 10 -- 9 scenes
  
• Ch. 11 -- 8 scenes
  

That's it for now. I hope I have more to report tonight or tomorrow.</p>

Lucy had some interesting things to say about action heroes vs anti-heroes.

Her blog entries appear in my LiveJournals Friends -- link in sidebar. If you not checking those journals, you're missing some interesting thoughts re: writing.

On to the comments.
This is a compilation of some things mentioned on both versions of Presto Speaks! I'm putting just excerpts here. You can check the comments field in the respective entries for the full text.

From the LJ version
Lucy said:

"When I've written the first draft of the first chapter I get a feel for
what I want the rhythm of the piece to be. And then I like to stick to a certain
rhythm, not slavishly, but generally, for the space of the book." ...

She went on to give examples.

Karen said:

"I think I've mentioned before that I try to have each chapter fit the theme of
the chapter title, with different plot threads addressing the same ideas in
different ways. I have no idea how I do this, whether it just happens in my
subconscious and comes out that way, whether I'm imposing order by where I make
my cuts and how I arrange events, or whether I'm straining to read in something
no one else would ever see because it's not really there." ...

She added a comment about a quirk she'd noticed in the length of those chapters.

On the BlogSpot version:
Andrea said:

"Like you say here: [ I usually just stop when it feels right and there's
usually some pattern that emerges. And I start where things should logically
pick up in the story. ]When I am READING a novel, I usually don't pay that much
attention to how or when a chapter ends or begins. Especially if I'm involved
heart-n-soul and totally unaware of my existence in the Real World. And a reader
with no writing aspirations would probably notice even less."

Wil said:

"Shelley [sic], chapter breaks occur for me when the action is headed off in a
new direction from what you’ve just done / discussed / saw / heard in the
previous one. Sometimes they’re too long and I’m advised to split them, but
often I resist if that division hasn’t occurred as described. So what if one
chapter is twenty pages and the next is forty?" ...

The rest was about parts and prologues/epilogues.

As a reader, I use breaks as stopping points because it makes it easier for me to find my place next time. And I do get a bit irritated when the chapters are alternating character povs and I'm really into one character only to be wrenched away at a critical moment and the next chapter reunites me with another character I've had to leave for a while. Yet as a writer, I do that too. I find this less annoying as a reader when the alternating povs are scene by scene instead of chapter by chapter. But the annoyance hasn't yet gotten me to stop reading.

And clearly as writers, we each have our own ways of looking at chapters, with some overlap. Thanks for the comments. I'm always interested in learning how different people approach the same aspect of writing or the process of writing in general.