Musings.
Been forever since I posted here, but not for lack of off-screen action. In the last seven months, I've worked on four stories set in the Westverse or somewhere next-door to it (two are in edits, one is about to get there, who knows with the fourth), gotten halfway through chapter three of "To The Dead," plotted one rather metaphysical science fiction novella I'll probably never write and come up with the character roster for an off-kilter superhero comic that I'll probably never script, and concocted a huge story arc for a project with shaenie that could easily surpass 200,000 words before the end of it. I went on a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler binge that may have finally cured me of the belief that when it comes to adjectives, more is more, and I've gotten to know at least two of my characters well enough that their dialogue and actions have started to write themselves.
I could do a whole post on the shifts I'm experiencing in my writing style and my understanding of the craft of storytelling (that sounds incredibly pretentions, but I feel like I'm starting to get what it means to tell a story on a blueprints-and-scaffolding level instead of just a paint-and-polish one), but what prompted me to post now is my decision that I needed to re-work a 2,000 word chunk of a story in edits. If you've ever beta'd for me, then you know that for me to axe three consecutive sentences is a big deal. And the 2,000 words in question are not in any way sub-par: shaenie's sections are excellent as always, and the parts I contributed have some of my favorite images and lines that I've come up with in the last six months. But the thing is, they don't fit the arc of one of the characters. If this story were a one-shot, as we originally conceived it to be, they'd be fine, but there are nearly three years of plot that follow this now, and keeping this scene as written would short-cut my character to a place that it'd more accurately take him nearly a year of subjective time to get to.
This isn't an unusual thing to experience when writing a story--I get that. But the thing is, this is the first time I've been deep enough into a story to see the forest past the trees, to be able to keep a lovely surface from blinding me to the flawed angles and weak joins underneath. So even though this equals some mental sweat for me (and possibly for my lovely cowriter), and there are pieces I'll be sorry to see go, I'm mostly amazed that I figured out they needed to go at all.
It's neat to witness myself getting better.
I could do a whole post on the shifts I'm experiencing in my writing style and my understanding of the craft of storytelling (that sounds incredibly pretentions, but I feel like I'm starting to get what it means to tell a story on a blueprints-and-scaffolding level instead of just a paint-and-polish one), but what prompted me to post now is my decision that I needed to re-work a 2,000 word chunk of a story in edits. If you've ever beta'd for me, then you know that for me to axe three consecutive sentences is a big deal. And the 2,000 words in question are not in any way sub-par: shaenie's sections are excellent as always, and the parts I contributed have some of my favorite images and lines that I've come up with in the last six months. But the thing is, they don't fit the arc of one of the characters. If this story were a one-shot, as we originally conceived it to be, they'd be fine, but there are nearly three years of plot that follow this now, and keeping this scene as written would short-cut my character to a place that it'd more accurately take him nearly a year of subjective time to get to.
This isn't an unusual thing to experience when writing a story--I get that. But the thing is, this is the first time I've been deep enough into a story to see the forest past the trees, to be able to keep a lovely surface from blinding me to the flawed angles and weak joins underneath. So even though this equals some mental sweat for me (and possibly for my lovely cowriter), and there are pieces I'll be sorry to see go, I'm mostly amazed that I figured out they needed to go at all.
It's neat to witness myself getting better.