[nanomadness] Something gained from writing in ether.
...there is a small exercise I do in writing longer fiction. I do not know how it would work for anyone else, or even whether it actually works for me-- that is, whether my books would be any different if I did not do it. It is the closest I come to the original Hemingway dictum, however, and it is the main reason I was so intrigued by his notion when I first came across it. I do leave something out:; or rather, there is something which I do not include.
In writing anything of length, I always compose--either on paper and then destroy it, or in my head and let it be--a scene or scenes involving my protagonist (and possibly separate ones for other important characters) having nothing to do with the story itself-- just something that happened to him/her/it once upon a time. I accept it as a real experience, a part of the character's life history, and I may even refer to it in the story itself. But I never include it. I do this under the belief that the character should be larger than his present circumstances indicate, should be defined for me in terms of a bigger picture of his life than the reader ever sees.
Roger Zelazny, "The Parts that are Only Glimpsed: Three Reflexes", Unicorn Variations
That quote's always stuck with me, and this year more than any I keep coming back to it (probably because I have been rereading Amber). Writing a novel in November isn't enough. I can't come in cold on it without having built up a world around this story. Otherwise it'll just be a self-contained bubble, a shallow pool that isn't deep enough to get immersed in. So, right now, I'm writing shorts. Shorts about the people around Gwen, shorts about the world she lives in, about the people who love her, the villains who get in her way.
There might not be any interest in them, but they are making the characters more real for me, and if the characters are more real for me, then maybe I can make them more real on the page.
I don't know if I'm going to put up bits of Gathering Storm in November, but if I do put up some of these shorts, glimpses of the world within, would anybody be interested?