At some point before I left for VT, I split chapters 11 and 12 into about four or five or six separate pieces, because when it was all packed together into the ms proper, I felt like I was drowning in this part of the story and couldn't see it properly. I pulled it so far apart it ended up in separate files, because that's what it takes for me to be able to wrap my mind around it.

I took all however-many-there-are of these files to VT, but had no time to work on or even look at them.

So today I pulled up one of the files and started in on a new scene for it. I got a full crude draft of the scene written; it's basically my guy up in a tree not doing anything. However, he almost does something, then decides not to, and that's the point the scene makes. I ended it on a tremendous hook of forthcoming doom...and then realized I've got to somehow pick up from there in the next scene, which unfortunately has nothing whatsoever to do with forthcoming doom.

It occurs to me that this is going to be a continuing problem; each time I try to raise stakes plot-wise to keep up tension and pacing, I'm going to have to figure out what to do with that upping of tension as the next scene begins. It can't just disappear, can it? You can't leave somebody hanging on the edge of a cliff, then in the next scene show him doing laundry or eating supper as if the cliff-edge never happened. Can you?

Hmm. It's mental cliffs I'm having trouble with, not physical ones. I can get people to let go of physical cliffs and walk away. But I keep pushing my character to the mental/emotional edge (ex. "Hooray, I'm free to go kill everybody now!" or "OMG, I have just unleashed our doom!")...and that's where I don't know how to pick up and move on with the story. ("After unleashing our doom, I went to do a couple loads of laundry.")

I've never really noticed how other writers handle this. I need to take a look at some books--and/or remember some movies--that do handle it. Could be the answer's partly in the transition following the hook. Could be that the next section needs to start with narration and not in scene. Or vice versa? Wow, I have no clue. I'm not even sure if I should be thinking about it right now. Maybe I should just continue writing up these sections and not worry about how to pull them together for the reader yet.

Wait, just thought of something. Maybe one solution is to slant the hook. Like, instead of ending on "I have just unleashed our doom!" end on "I have just unleashed our doom, but Character X must never know!"

Something to keep in mind, anyway.

Back to dystopian. Days ago I decided to clarify the problem about chapters 11 & 12 to myself. I haven't been able to work on them because they're transitional chapters between big plot stuff happening, and I have no idea what needs to be in them. There's a ton of information the reader needs that could go in there.

So I pulled those two chapters out separately, into a new document. Then I copied and pasted every bit of information or character exchange that might be able to go in them. I ended up with over 60 double-spaced pages, which I figured I need to cut down to 20 at most.

It's much less overwhelming to work through the story transition (from beginning to middle) now that I have this new document in front of me. I've started working with chapter 11, and it seems I do have to pick up in-scene from the end of chapter 10. I've been strongly feeling a need to switch to some kind of transitional out-of-scene narration for the sake of pacing. It just feels like too much, one chapter after another continuously in scene. I'm over a hundred pages in and am still on Day 2 (!). But I left everybody at the end of chapter 10 in mid-confrontation with a gun, so from what I can see there's just no way around staying in scene as 11 opens. Maybe later I'll figure out a way to switch it up.

As it (loosely) stands now, I start chapter 11 with a verbal fight, and after that I hit the same problem: stay in scene, or try to switch to out-of-scene narration. Right now I'm thinking I may just try staying in scene.

I definitely have a problem with this aspect of writing. I think it's part of my usual huge weakness: transitions. My natural tendency is to just follow everyone through their days, step by step. I feel that I especially need to get a grip on the pacing of book beginnings, but I'm not sure how to do it. Maybe I need to look at some really good character-driven books and see exactly how much time passes in the beginning, and how it's handled.

I'm also not used to writing books with a lot of plot-type stuff happening, though, so maybe they just feel different; maybe I'm too used to dealing with severely character-driven story.

The reason I say that is that winter residency in VT is coming up, and I know I've got to do a reading. I'm going to read something from this ms, but it all looks the same to me and I can't tell what's interesting or boring about it anymore, and I don't have a lot of time to think about it. So I asked some fellow writers who will also be at the residency to look at my 100 pages and tell me what people might like to hear. They all zeroed in on the real-time action/confrontation scene with a beating and a killing. It hadn't stood out to me; it just seemed like another piece of the literary puzzle.

I realized then than I've got to consistently give more weight in my head to this type of scene in the ms. Writing these plotty scenes is more about technical craft-type thought than anything else, but they carry the reader along and propel the story. They affect pacing in ways I can't afford to forget about. Also, since I obviously don't have a feel for the tremendous job they do pacing-wise for the book, I need to stay open to the possibility that my feelings re. now-it's-time-for-a-narrative-break could be wrong.

Very busy. An interesting thing happened, though. I've been spending hours and hours thinking about other people's work, and I'm at a point in the semester where most of that thinking is teasing out different story threads by looking at scenes and pieces to see what they say about character/thematic arcs. I have found that when you're writing organically and have a decent grip on your characters, this stuff naturally rises to the surface and starts to fall into place--if you keep your eyes peeled and stay focused on the work and not on finishing/publishing. You can begin to figure out that your character starts out ___ way, and since you like him and know what you want for him, you understand that by the end he's going to be ____ way. And you can use that to put your book together.

So I've been thinking about this stuff, literally, for hours and hours, over days and days, for many different characters not my own (but that I like and sometimes also love). I've been picking out the main idea a scene or snippet gives the reader, and thinking, among other things: what does this tell us about the character, and where does it go along his/her arc?

Last night I finished up late, no time to work on my own stuff, but I wanted to clear my head and just pull up my ms and write something--not for the purpose of making progress, but just to touch base quickly with my story world and my people. I opened the file, and decided to see if I could pin down anything about a transitional piece I haven't written yet, one that takes place near the end.

I can't remember if I blogged this, but during another mind-clearing session last week, I took some more structural ideas a writer friend had been talking about from The Plot Whisperer, and made a list of all my scenes, written and unwritten. I wanted to see if I could get anything useful out of laying TPW ideas over what I had, and trying to see my ms in those terms. When I did this, nothing changed much in a concrete way, but considering my ms in terms of the story points that Alderson emphasizes made me think about the ms in a slightly different way that I think will provide energy to the story.*

While I was doing all that, I also got more specific about the part that leads from the middle to the end, and added a small transitional scene to the list: Two of my guys prepare to leave, and this other character comes out trying to follow them.**

So last night I decided to see if anything came to mind about that scene--maybe what the two guys would say to each other, or what would happen when the other character came out. I ended up sketching out a "moment."*** I'm pretty big on "moments," and I felt one was needed here to set the main secondary character in our minds before he heads off into the ending. And a moment is a perfect thing to write when you don't have much time and can't get into the flow of story.

I knew this guy was just sitting there, on a rock or stump or wall or something, waiting for my MC so they could leave. That's the "moment"--we see him as the MC is approaching him. I knew what the secondary character's intentions were, going into the ending sequence, so I thought about his hands, his face, the way he sat, his general attitude, and I was playing around with the best words to evoke all that. And as I played with it, I started realizing how different he was from the way he started out at the beginning. All the words to describe him were different, everything evoked in the beginning was the opposite from what was being evoked here, near the end.

I suddenly saw very clearly that this was the end point of his arc. He started out ____ way, but now he is ____.

I suddenly saw very clearly: all my middle-of-the-book scenes that need to accomplish a plethora of story jobs also need to do this: step by step, they need to show how story events make the guy change from what he is in the beginning when the MC first considers him, to this guy who is sitting here now, at the end.

When the middle scenes do that, they'll have nearly the last bit of power and grit that the story's been needing to give it traction and momentum all the way through.

My mind only made those connections because it's been thinking about and looking for the same types of patterns over and over for days if not weeks, in other people's work. That's why, when I was just putzing around with a paragraph of description before quitting for the day, my mind automatically dove in to tease out the same patterns in my own ms.

Another funny thing: this morning I was thinking about the way the character sat on that rock/stump/whatever, the way he held himself, etc., and I thought: this guy knows who he is. Then I remembered sometime back in a fuzzy distant past asking myself what this character wanted--what made him leave his old home and take off into the unknown. Back then I thought about it, and had a dim feeling that he left because he didn't know who he was. I didn't like that; I was very doubtful and suspicious of the feeling, because "He wants to know who he is" is a vague, unhelpful, generic goal. It doesn't tell you anything. It's like an answer that fills in the blank on a junior high English test. I felt that it was really true about him, but I also felt that it was probably just a side thing you understand about your character, and I proceeded under the assumption that as I wrote more, his problem and his longings would take on some texture and depth.

But no, there is it: he starts off shapeless, soft, unformed, naive, passive. And by the end he's firm, solid, knowing, capable, competent. In the beginning, he doesn't know who he is. By the end, he does.

And now that I think about it, he also....acts. He's sitting there waiting because he's made the decision to leave and he is about to act on it. And he will. That's why he'll be there in the climactic scene and in the very final scene, too, with my MC. And...ahem...it's also why he'll be able to influence the story outcome and present the MC with his climactic choice.****

So, there you go.

And now, back to work. On other people's stuff.





*This is what happened when I looked at my beginning-to-middle transition in TPW terms, too.

**And then he gets his eye gouged out!

***I don't know the technical word, but that's what I call it. It's where you stop, like a freeze frame, and give the reader something, hit them with it strongly so they absorb it. A moment can be as tiny as emphasizing an idea by using white space via a new paragraph, or it could be a whole page of description.

****Which I haven't quite nailed down yet. But I will, if the creek don't rise, a meteor doesn't strike, and I don't get hit by a bus.

Yeah, I think I'm getting through this tricky part--after having overwritten it, underwritten it, rethought it, and re-sorted it out multiple, multiple, multiple times.

Another thought/quote passed along by the friend who's been reading Alderson's book has turned out to be very helpful.

Re. the "threshhold" between beginning and middle*:

"When you find the scene that serves this purpose, rewrite it with the significance it deserves."




*See previous post

I went back over the lengthy transition, this time shifting mental gears to an "end of Part One" mindset. This allowed me to cut all but two of the scenes and to slant those two toward building a new hook for my imaginary "end of Part One." Now "Part One" ends on a strong idea that draws the reader on, thus buying me a little time to ease into "Part Two."* The scenes I cut haven't really gone anywhere; they can either be cannibalized into other scenes, or used early in Part Two.

A writer friend who has been reading The Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson shared this quote, about the transition from beginning to middle: "The threshold marks the point at which the real adventure begins." I wonder if looking at the middle as an adventure rather than as a sagging pain-in-the@ss can help me figure out how to present it to the reader. I may try, although it feels a little like telling myself that my ugly baby is beautiful, all evidence to the contrary.

I wish I had a week to lock myself into a hotel room and do nothing but work on this ms.



*That's not to say that the end of Part One works as is. I'm pretty sure it s*cks. But I'm also trying to leave it and work out the details later.

The transition into the middle section has been too big and messy for me to comprehend, so today I printed it out (the transition) with the aim of getting rid of the parts that aren't strictly necessary. The goal was to keep my writing mind at a slight distance and not get sucked into any scenes or trains of thought--especially not explanations or backstory. Just read all the pieces and mark the ones that needed to be moved away and dealt with later; that was the goal.

The transition I started with was 19 single-spaced pages long--in 11-point font. No kidding. No wonder I couldn't wrap my head around it.

I ended up having to dip fairly deeply into the very first part of the transition in order to get started in the same mindset as the MC. After that I kept myself to the slightly-distant writing viewpoint, the one that allows me to see things in terms of structure and overall pacing. I went through whittling scenes and pieces off one by one, and putting the ones that were left in an order that seemed to work.

I ended up with a transition of 10 pages (single-spaced in 12-point), made up of five or so scenes, some of which are currently just sketched notes. It probably doesn't really count as a transition, and probably won't read as one, when all is said and done. But to me, right now, it is one, and I think I may have it to where it'll move me smoothly into the middle without creating a total slump. There's no question that it's moving slower than the first hundred pages, but I probably need to take what I can get at this point.

I just hope I don't get the transitional part fleshed out and flowing and making sense--and then find that I've lapsed into a boring drone that makes everyone's eyes glaze over. That will mean starting over, rethinking it from scratch. And dear Lord, I hope that does not happen. I don't know what the odds are, maybe fifty-fifty, that it'll turn out that way. I don't expect to know till I get to the end of the path and turn to look back.

Taking a little time from other people's work so I don't go bonkers from WIP-separation. I'm trying to set and clean up the transition between the first part of the story and the middle part. (I haven't decided what to do about the questionable spot near the end of the first section yet, and am working around it.)

For the transition, I realized I don't have to follow my MC as he works himself around to causing the next encounter I need him to have. The encounter can start on its own, offstage, and somebody can come to him and say, "Hey, you need to get in here and deal with this." That moves the story to its next problem quickly and efficiently.

Okay, hmm. I think the first 107 pages are workable. I need to enter the edits I made while reading (which will take at least a couple of days), then figure out what this last scene or two needs to be (out of the ten or so that could go here), and then I think I can set most of this aside in my head and start fresh with the middle. Not sure how the pacing's going to play out from here, because even if I alternate stuff happening with the stuff I'm more interested in, the stuff that's happening isn't as edge-of-your-seat as what's in the first 107 pages. So, we'll see.

Busy here, but I have been working on the dystopian a little nearly every day, still working my way through the deeper grounding of the part just before the middle. I can't seem to wrap my mind around what I'm going to do as I move into the middle. I've got a lot of scenes lined up ready to go, but I'm feeling iffy about the transition into them. Iffy as in not knowing what to do.

I think this is why I'm currently compelled to do that deeper grounding. If I can get it right, I should be able to understand this upcoming transition, and also how the middle needs to be paced, timewise. The middle is where more time starts passing between scenes, and I'm not sure how to show that without losing the rapid pacing I've been going for in these first hundred pages. Also, the transition into the middle will set up its pacing and get it rolling--so if I blunder around not getting this transition right, the next hundred or however many pages won't coalesce.

I'm wondering if I need to mentally break the story here and start a new section--like, in my head, call the forthcoming middle "Part II" and treat it as a separate entity as I write. Or it could be that the narration needs to flow directly from one chapter to the next.

What I might do is get these hundred or so pages settled enough that I'm willing to let other people see them, and send them to my agent for a reality check re. pacing while I regroup and dive into the next part. Who knows. It looks to me like I need to trim some of the end of the hundred-page part anyway, and that may take a while at this rate.

I've been considering having brief tags at the beginnings of chapters, to help ease the moment of understanding when the reader finally gets the main secondary character's full story. It might just be sappy and off-putting though. Not sure.

Yesterday, filled in a transition between two scenes. In order to get it grounded, I had to rethink the layout of the place my MC lives. Sketched out a map.

Very busy. Have been thinking about the dystopian, and realizing it's time to print out and do a readthrough. I have no sense of how the story ideas flow into each other, or whether the action I've got is rising action. And I can't hone any of the scenes that need to be honed until I'm sure they're in the right places.

That will have to wait till I have time to actually read my own ms.

For now, I'm suddenly thinking about the former GN re. format and structure. I've had to do a lot of thinking lately about how format and structure can be used to bind a story together. One big idea is that providing an outside viewpoint can create tension if it shows conflicts and dangers the main character is unaware of.

I already knew I needed that outside context in the former GN, and have been trying to shoehorn it in mostly via my MC's pov. Also, some time back, I tried putting framing devices around chapters. They weren't working because they weren't cohesive enough. It was like slamming the reader into a wall every time a new chapter started.

So now I'm thinking I'll look around at other characters and see how many might have something to say. I've had to do double backbends to get the world-building context-y information into my MC's pov, so I'm interested to see exactly how many places there are where it can come out and happen in real time. I may look to see if there's a potential pattern for outside viewpoints, something that would keep the story flowing while also keeping tension up.

It's not going to be simple, no matter what. This ms is a real puzzle.

Note to self: think about book X

Forgot to say, I finally made myself start reading a book I've been assuring people I was going to read for 2-3 years now. Recently I even had to fork over a self-imposed fine of five bucks to a fellow writer for yet again failing to read it as promised.

So I finally started it, this book everybody's read and praised, and boy, does it suck. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm absolutely fascinated by it. Because the writer makes it work. Through sheer force of plot and structure, the story moves along pretty grippingly, even though if you look very closely, you can see that nothing's actually there. There isn't anything going on but people moving around from here to there, and some mysteries that aren't very interesting because who cares if they're solved or not?

But, wow. The structure completely hides all that; it misdirects the reader's attention and gives the impression of being a gripping, excitingly wild ride. I can see that it partly does so through the way it uses hooks, and also by the way it uses alternating narrators.

This is exactly what I need to figure out how to do for my former GN.

What's really got me super-zeroed in on it now, though, is realizing that one of the two POV characters has a negative goal. I think part of what covers that up is the structure and the constant updating and adding of hooks, but there's also an announced strategy. And here's where it gets even more interesting: the announced strategy makes no sense. But it doesn't matter, because it works anyway. You don't even notice it has no reason to be either a strategy or announced.*

The only reason I noticed any of this is because I have a plotting disability and was bored, reading. I can see how gripping the story is, but I'm not at all gripped. It's sort of like the little kid who can't enjoy a great magician's trick because he isn't sophisticated enough to understand that he's supposed to be following the hand gestures. Sometimes there are advantages to having humongous blind spots.

Sometime when I have a chance, I want to really dig into this, maybe even go through and make a list of every scene. I bet I will find that it's extremely screenplay-worthy, with every scene carefully designed and set like a stage, and with actors hitting their marks right as the curtains go up. I also bet that nearly every chapter will have a deliberately imposed ramp-up of a ticking clock, and there's something intriguing about the hooks, too--like, maybe there's at least one new one introduced in the body of the chapter, and then another, different hook hits hard at the end?

Also need to look at:

• Which hooks are external stuff happening and which are internally-driven emotional cliffhangers.

• How the chapters cut in and out to hide the relative passivity of one of the storylines.

• How a passive character is given the appearance of being an active one.

• Beginnings and ends of chapters, making note of transitions.

• Beginnings and ends of chapter, for cliffhangers (I think some are actually dropped and never followed up on. But I'm not even sure! This is great!).

• Beginnings and ends of chapters, as read sequentially rather than alternately. I'm interested to know what the author has chosen to skip as not-ramp-up-able enough. Because, you know, I think s/he was probably right, since the book works so well.

Forcing myself to finish this thing is going to be a chore. But I think I can learn a ton of stuff when I go back to it once it's read.



*Something that's come up in discussion with writer friends is this theory: An announced strategy doesn't have to really do anything in the story; as soon as the actual story gets started, the announced strategy can just disappear, and be naturally swallowed up in the bigger, stronger, "real" story without you having to deal with it. But here, it seems to me, the possibility presents itself that the announced strategy doesn't even necessarily have to arise from story. Which poses the question: exactly how far can you go with the artificial pasting on of stuff to keep your story moving?

Yesterday, smoothed out some scenes in an attempt to get more chapters to flow as coherent units. Because I can't tell if they're actually working until I can read them for flow.

Today, realized I need to write a bit where one character smiles at another, and my MC notices it. This is actually a pretty cool thing to realize, so hooray.

A writer friend informs me that I missed one of my favorite movie scenes this morning. It's a scene I consider to be one of the best moments in movie history: Charlton Heston putting on his pants in Big Country.

See, Gregory Peck comes to CH's bunkhouse in the wee hours to wake him up so they can duke it out mano a mano in private. CH gets out of his bunk and, in about one-and-a-half seconds, Puts On His Pants before heading outside to fight. By g*d, it's the manliest, toughest putting-on-of-pants since men have had pants to put on. Charlton Heston is not messing around. This guy is mega-macho, and he's ready to kick Greg Peck's @ss.

Ah, here it is, at 2:32:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEFJllAj9b8&nofeather=True

What this has to do with writing is that I suddenly realized this is one of the signs I need to keep an eye out for, to make sure I'm not losing character in service to plot (and therefore getting off course). Losing track of character in tiny moments--for example, a generic putting-on-of-pants when the character would in reality Put On His Pants--may be a sign that I'm rushing through to get to a plot point.

So I need to make sure I stay in touch with the character consistently, especially during transitions like this one in the bunkhouse. As I work out this story, I need to make sure to go back and check every moment from inside the character's head and body, to ensure that I'm not skimming and therefore risking getting off track.

Also, even if a generic putting-on-of-pants is called for, it's so much more satisfying to make something like that strengthen and sharpen, rather than letting it slide by as a throwaway. Hmm, I just saw about a million of these places very well done in Dorothy Dunnett's second Lymond book, Queen's Play. But I don't have time to find any of them right now. When I start book 3 I'll try to remember to mark some as I go along. She's fantastic at this sort of thing.

But I just remembered something else. I do have a generic putting-on-of-pants in my WIP. And the reason I have it, now that I think about it, is because I'm fudging: I don't know what this guy wears, exactly. This is not good. I've got to get it figured out at some point*--preferably sooner rather than later.



*Figuring it out means going through the backstory and world in my head to understand what's available for everyone to wear, what this guy's clothes are likely to look like and be made of, where he got his, etc. I'd also better know how this group of characters handles their clothes, like mending, laundry, etc. This is not a civilization that's going to have a lot of throwaways; clothes are hard to come by. They're going to be wearing everything down to rags, and they don't have soap, either. However, they also know about bacteria and how diseases are passed along.** So. Lots to think about.


**Hmm, Laurence Wylie's Village in the Vaucluse has something useful to think about here. The French kids are extremely careful to keep their clothing clean; they're brought up from childhood to never get a speck of dirt on anything. They have few clothes and most of their moms have to wash everything via hand-scrubbing.

Was thinking about getting the MC to the scene where he beats the h#ll out of another guy. Since this (the beating) is an important emotional point in the story, I can't just white-space the transition and have him show up at the other guy's home. We need to know how the MC's feeling as he heads there, so we know what to be worried about.

Next chance I get I'm going to pull together all the pieces I have about the antagonist and put them where that transition scene's going to be, so that I have them at hand to work with. This is a good place for most of it to go, because the MC's main worry as he heads over to beat up the guy is that he's got to get through the antagonist first, to do so.

This transition scene will involve moving through physical space, and arriving at the antagonist's home (also the home of the about-to-get-beaten-up guy). So I need to settle on what that home looks like and where it is. And I've got to work backwards to do it; for example, I know the antagonist is going to always make sure his home has a back way out, because he once killed a bunch of bandits by barring the door to trap them inside and setting the place on fire. Also, thinking about the MC's, er, bathroom habits has made me realize that the antagonist has always lived on the move, camping as best he can. This is his first permanent residence; he chose the site, fixed it up the way he thought it needed to be, and set the ground rules for everyone living there. But since he's more or less raised himself on the run in the wilderness, and since his focus has been strictly on shelter and defense, he'll have made mistakes about sanitation, daily upkeep, etc.--in other words, about what's needed to keep the inhabitants healthy and functioning.

And, if I think about who he is and how he feels, I know that he's sharp and observing, always in survival mode. So he'd notice how things are done at the MC's place, and though he probably wouldn't ask about any of it, he'd work out in his head the benefits of doing things that way, and enforce them in some form or fashion at his home.

And the MC might notice one of these changes in fixtures or routine, when he comes on the scene.

So two things I want to do when I get a chance are 1) get all the bits and pieces I have about the antagonist together in one area so they're ready for me to write that transition scene, and 2) get a place set in my mind where the antagonist lives, and where the beating-up takes place. Once I do that, I can figure out where everybody is when the MC arrives, and what they're doing.

Yesterday I pulled together another set of random pieces, only this time starting where the actual story left off, with the characters heading to bed for the night.

My intention when I sat down was to mess around with the next fun and important (to me) scene, where my MC beats the h#ll out of a guy. To me, everything between the place where the storyline currently leaves off and my MC beating the h#ll out of this guy is just transition. However, I can't just say, "In the morning, the MC woke up and went to beat the h#ll out of a guy," because we need to see the inciting-incident-of-a-character, who's been unconscious for 50 pages and is lying in the middle of the living room. I'm pretty sure the reader's going to want to know if he's waking up yet.

Somehow, instead of messing around with the little piece I wanted to work on, I ended up proceeding chronologically into the story, pulling together more snippets and interactions that I already have sitting around but don't know what to do with. The MC gets up, eats breakfast, talks to the now-conscious inciting-incident-of-a-character, smacks a kid in the face, makes arrangements for the day, threatens the inciting-incident-of-a-character, then leaves. The only new thing I wrote was a couple short paragraphs of character development. But they were productive ones, so that was good.

Somehow I need to figure out where these people go to the bathroom. They don't have running water. I know they go away from their home to do the more serious aspects of their business, but I can't imagine some teenage guy's going to roll out of bed half-asleep, make his way through a maze of rooms and tumbled down walls, and head to a predesignated place in the woods to take an early morning leak. However, their water source is not far away; it's a spring/well, and these people know about contamination and germs. OTOH, I just kind of doubt that he'd do anything but step outside and maybe face a wall. If that much. OTOOH, eww.

Maybe I should quiz household punk #1. He might have some insight.

I also need to think back to the MC's childhood, the place he grew up, the rules and customs they had. That might affect the situation.

Thinking about the Hobby Formerly Known as the Former GN. Glanced through it, feeling very dissatisfied. It's got a lot of purty writin'. To which I say: So what? I'll bet my dog could write purty, if I trained it to type.

I thought about why I want to write this ms--obviously I do, because I keep sticking with it even though it's just purty and nothing more. The reason I want to write it is because I'm annoyed and angry--but not super angry, just sort of smolderingly angry.

Then I thought about where the ms picks up and gets interesting--the places where it gets more than just "purty." It perks up and gets a spurt of energy in the places where my snarky smoldering annoyance slips into the third person narrative.

This story is set 3,000 years ago. The points I want to make are from today's perspective. I've tried to make those points staying in a 3,000 year-old POV, but every time I go through the usual process of getting the reader to come to their own conclusions by experiencing a sequence of events along with the MC, it clearly warps the ms. There's too big a gap between today's world and the world of the book.

If I look at what I have, I've got a ms where I've consistently taken my own snarky conclusions out and tried to make the reader "get" the same conclusions on their own. It's clear that this process is not working.

I think a big part of this is getting the right third person voice and understanding how present I need to be in this ms.

A big part is also figuring out how to transition from piece to piece. I like the floating-around thing, and it's fun--but it's not satisfying me as far as actually getting something said. If I wasn't annoyed or smolderingly angry, I could probably float around the story forever and be content. But you can't float around a ms and be angry; the two just don't mix. Anger has purpose and direction.

Sigh.

I've got at least three different types of story going on here, and I don't know how to transition between them. They take place at different times and on different continents. In some the same people have different names. I don't see that I can just label the transitions by place and time, because it's so confusing that labels would be meaningless. On top of which sometimes the people in the sections are the same and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they're the same but the reader might not know it yet.

I pulled out my Scott McCloud, as an aid to thinking about transitions and spaces between. He lists five choices about visual storytelling: choice of moment, choice of frame, choice of image, choice of word, choice of flow. They also apply to textual storytelling, IMO.

Choice of moment: which moments to include and which to leave out.
Choice of frame: distance and angle.
Choice of image: Characters, objects, environment within the frame (scene).
Choice of word: the actual writing part.
Choice of flow: guiding readers from scene to scene.

More things to think about:

Choice of frame affects reading flow.
Choice of flow includes clearing the readers' path of obstacles.

Also, the types of transitions are: moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and the non-sequitur. The ones I'm having trouble with are scene-to-scene, taking the reader across space and time. McCloud points out that deductive reasoning is often required in reading scene-to-scene transitions.

Hmm. I need to look at what I have (which is about 250 pages worth of stuff) and see what idea storyline A could end on, that would echo or pick up on an idea in the first scene of the next section, which may be storyline C, but it may be B, I dunno yet. I don't know if storyline B and C need to go one at a time, or intercut.

I also need to get storyline B, the main storyline, carved to a bare minimum.

I also need to write out storyline C, because I only have some of it.

It also occurs to me that you can remove all obstacles by repeating a sentence or paragraph that opened or ended a scene earlier in the book. If you repeat it again later, the exact same way, that puts the reader right back in the same scene, at the same place where s/he first heard it. That would be a strong and effective way to transition the three storylines back together near the end: repeat the exact same words from storyline A--carry the reader straight back into A, only now knowing everybody's baggage and being fully invested in the stakes.

Have been tinkering with the former GN. Pulled the ending to the front...and am stuck there, not knowing how to lead into the old beginning.

I seem to keep running into the same problem of balance in all three of my current WIPs. All three require world-building and backstory, and I keep hitting the same wall, over and over again: at some point the story slows down too much.

And now that I think about it, this probably relates at least partially to my old nemesis, transitions. Either I'm leaping around from scene to scene, or I get immersed in the minutiae of the characters' daily lives and have trouble thinking outside that natural progression. There isn't much middle ground in my head, and that middle ground is where the transitions are. It's also where the world-building needs to be, I think.

Maybe the thing to do (with the former GN) is to keep tabs on what idea needs to come next. Usually every scene needs to carry one main idea. This ms is not a normal format with normal scenes, but maybe trying to think in big-picture terms of scenes would help.

Technically maybe this book shouldn't be possible, since the MC has no goals, positive or negative, and doesn't want anything at all until the very end. But now I'm thinking that surely there's a way to get the structure to carry the story forward, since the content apparently can't do it. That's what I'm looking at now. I'm thinking I might be able to use structure rather than content to pose the "questions" that keep the pages turning, if I mess around with this long enough--and if I can keep from falling into the same old mental rut.

Worked on dystopian ms yesterday, and got a lot done. Added maybe 5 pages (single-spaced) to chapter three and finished it off, and am now messing around with the pieces of chapter four.

Dunno if chapter three works. I'm pretty sure I've got too many little side issues in there, that will have to be pulled and moved elsewhere because they'll be slightly distracting and interrupt the flow of thought. I tried to get most of them cut out, but more kept popping in as I worked.

Surprisingly, the transition between the two parts of chapter three ended up coming from a different secondary character than the one I thought. I'd fixed up the character I'd been trying to focus on, really thinking through the scene from her pov--and then as I was done and getting my MC out the door, I paused to ground the scene for a beat, just for pacing so it would read smoothly. When I paused I used one of the other secondary characters for the grounding, because I realized I didn't know exactly what she was doing at that specific moment. I knew generally; she was on the floor bending over this sick guy, tending to him. But I didn't know specifically, like what her hands were doing, what her posture was, what she was looking at and thinking and feeling about the sick guy, at that particular moment. That's the kind of thing you sort of need to know. Especially the thinking and feeling, because those are what tell you about the "doing" and "looking at" parts.

When I paused to pinpoint her just for that one beat, to understand exactly what she was doing and feeling, I realized that the MC got mad at her. Well, not mad, just kind of exasperated and frustrated and burdened. But he went off onto this whole tangent of thought that became the transition, and carried the MC very nicely into the next part, and helped me trim the entire next scene.

I hope that transition doesn't end up being too much. I touched on a big idea that I'd been saving for later, so that bit may have to be cut. I can't tell whether to hint at it over the beginning of the book and use it for a tease, or slowly let the reader in on it in a straightforward manner, or just hit them with it later in the story. As of yesterday, the reader is slowly being let in on it in a straightforward manner. I'm iffy about whether it'll work, though. May be TMI too soon, and lead to reader overload. OTOH, they're already being teased with a lot of stuff, and may be suffering from tease overload instead of TMI overload. It may be best just to leave it out for now. Oh well, I'll have to wait till I read the whole thing over.

Which won't be today. Don't know how much if any work I'll get done today. Will be in the car most of the day--must take a spiral. No, wait, I think I already have one shoved between the seats.

Am finally getting back to dystopian ms. Last week, or the week before (forget which) I was about to miss yet another turn-in date I'd given my agent for having the partial in, and I was so close to finishing chapter 3 (and thus, the partial) that I decided to just sit down and devote myself entirely to finishing it, perhaps in a morning session, and then (thought I, tra-la!) it would be done by afternoon and I could dive back into all the other things piling up on my desk--dive in happily, freed of the shadow of this one important yet unfinished project.

Bad move (of course). I ended up getting stuck, but I was so close to having it fall into place that I spent the entire day trying to force it to work, and ended up without a partial and with all my other work piled even higher.

What happened was that I had the end of chapter three narrowed down to two possible scenes--but by the time I smoothed out the first part of chapter three and started popping the scenes in and out to figure out which one worked and built naturally, I had lost sight of the transition between them. So I kept gliding over it, using it to weld the front of the chapter and its following scene together, rather than thinking the transition through in solemn depth. I kept pushing it, redoing it over and over, and it wasn't working. Finally I had to give up, defeated, knowing I'd been a fool to think I could get this completed in a predetermined time slot.

A day or so later I realized I should have stopped and dealt with that transition as its own little scene, given it some time and respect, and checked in with the characters to make sure I was following their train of thought and not using them as a means to my end. They were fine in the actual scenes around it, and I knew how the transition worked to move the plot from one scene to the next. I just kind of forgot that the characters--especially my secondary characters--aren't my b*tches, so to speak. If I try to treat them like they're my b*tches, I'll end up paying for it. And I did.

So today I started on it again, and by now I already know which second scene to use, and where the chapter ends and where the next one starts*. But I've got to get this little transitional bit going, and I'm a little leery of it, like if I put my hand out it's going to bite me. At least I know what I have to do this time: treat it with respect.



*Due to the proverbial back-of-the-mind processing that goes on while you're busy with other stuff.