we're one, but we're not the same
I had two goals for this weekend (1. finish my spn_summergen story and 2. catch up with Mad Men in time for the s2 premiere) and I achieved neither of them. Sigh.
However, my spn_summergen story is well on its way to being done now. I had a huge crisis about how to get what needs to happen to actually happen, but I flailed at luzdeestrellas and angelgazing and figured out how to make a virtue of necessity, and now I think the story is on track. I have to write the big climactic scene and then the wrap-up, but I think it all works and makes sense now. I hope.
I have a feeling I will want to talk a lot about this story, and why I had such trouble writing it, after the names are revealed, whenever that will be.
I was reading this post about writing by flambeau and this really jumped out at me: don't be afraid to reconceptualize.
I think this happens to a lot of us, a lot of the time - we get an idea and we start writing (and okay, possibly I mean "me" when I say "we") and the slam right up into a wall. There are ways around the wall - up-and-over, down-and-under, around, and, of course, straight on through - but sometimes simply turning and following the wall along for a while, or retreating from it and heading in a different direction, is really what the story needs to work.
I have a lot of trouble with restructuring, with ripping things out that don't work and starting over. I tend to get attached, as if what I've written is CARVED IN STONE OMG and can't be changed. As if the story isn't fluid. And in some ways, to me, it isn't. This is one reason I don't like writing down fantasies and calling them stories - once I've given them a narrative shape, they can't be changed at whim. Once they're written down, I can no longer use them as fantasies, because they're locked into a series of events now, and this is how it happened (probably).
But yeah, changing tense, changing POV, changing the order in which things happen (not just in which they are told), can make a story work better.
This is all obvious stuff that I sometimes completely forget, until I run into a wall with a story and have to be reminded. Maybe the original idea is still sound, but it needs a few tweaks. Maybe it's not really very good on its own merits, but it leads somewhere awesome.
I need to be less afraid of making those kinds of changes - for me, they're always the last resort rather than an immediate option, because I am lazy, and if I've already written a thousand words in one direction, I really don't want to have to rip that out and start over. Especially not when I've got a deadline.
The other thing in torch's post that I found interesting was the section on POV, because I have been thinking a lot about POV lately. It used to be I simply "heard" the character narrating the story to me in my head, and that's when I would start writing. Nowadays, that happens to me a lot less; more and more lately, I start with ideas instead of opening lines, and the question of whose POV the story is in plagues me. It means I have to do a lot more thinking about what the story is about - not just plot-wise, but thematically, and why it would better to use Y's POV instead of X's.
Because I like single-POV stories. I really, really love tight third person POV, and one of the reasons for me - the main reason for me, I guess - is that it maintains narrative tension. In a romance, a lot of people choose to show both parties' points of view - I did it a lot myself when I first started writing - because of course we want to know what both parties are thinking!
But the thing is, for me, that leaches away a lot of the delicious tension of a romance. I mean, obviously, going into 99.44% of romance stories - pro or fan written - I am pretty sure Character A and Character B are going to wind up together (and when that surety is betrayed, I tend to not like the story; for a pro example, see Libby's London Merchant by Carla Kelly, in which the guy you think is the romantic hero turns out... not to be. I found that a very unsatisfying romance novel experience). In fanfic, mostly that worry is assuaged by pairing labels (not always, but mostly).
So the thing for me is, I already kinda know A and B are in love, or are going to be by the end of the story; that's why I'm reading the story in the first place. What I like is the uncertainty of the narrator, the "he doesn't love me, he could never love me, hey, wow, do you think he wants me the way I want him?" progression, and I feel like that awesome pining/realization template is completely undercut when you have character B going, "yes, yes, I love him so much, I am trying to win him over! Why isn't it working? Does he not love me?" or whatever. You would think that would double the pining enjoyment, but it doesn't, because instead of immersing myself completely in Character A's uncertainty, I'm getting Character B's refutation of it, and that switching keeps me aware of the story, puts up a distance between me and the characters that makes me less emotionally involved.
I realize this is totally a me-thing, how I read, but I much prefer staying with one character because I think it enhances the reading experience by keeping me immersed in the world of the story.
What I like in stories, and what I attempt to do (not always successfully), is to show, even from A's POV, how B really feels. So A is totally not getting that B is into him, but as a reader, you can see it, even if it takes A few thousand words to get there. That's not as easy to do as having a section from B's POV where B lays it all out for the reader, if not for A, but it's my preference, and it's fun and challenging (for values of fun and challenging that often include horrifyingly painful and hard) to write stories that way, and as a reader, for me, the emotional payoff is generally greater when I read stories written that way.
Obviously, there are stories that require dual or multiple points of view, and for me, those usually involve Action! or Adventure! or Mystery! Typically, a more casefilish story, or an action/adventure story, or a thriller or a mystery, can benefit from multiple narrators, especially if Our Heroes are separated and Events Are Happening in Many Locations. This keeps me as a reader up to speed without bringing the story to a screeching halt for long exposition dumps about What Happened to A in Prague while B was in Monte Carlo when Our Heroes Reunite on the rope bridge over the gorge in Borneo. Um. I don't know where that came from, but you know what I mean.
Since I tend to not write location-spanning thrillers so much as I write romances or casefiles or plotless character rambles, I generally stick to stories told from a single narrator's POV.
Obviously, mileage varies.
***
However, my spn_summergen story is well on its way to being done now. I had a huge crisis about how to get what needs to happen to actually happen, but I flailed at luzdeestrellas and angelgazing and figured out how to make a virtue of necessity, and now I think the story is on track. I have to write the big climactic scene and then the wrap-up, but I think it all works and makes sense now. I hope.
I have a feeling I will want to talk a lot about this story, and why I had such trouble writing it, after the names are revealed, whenever that will be.
I was reading this post about writing by flambeau and this really jumped out at me: don't be afraid to reconceptualize.
I think this happens to a lot of us, a lot of the time - we get an idea and we start writing (and okay, possibly I mean "me" when I say "we") and the slam right up into a wall. There are ways around the wall - up-and-over, down-and-under, around, and, of course, straight on through - but sometimes simply turning and following the wall along for a while, or retreating from it and heading in a different direction, is really what the story needs to work.
I have a lot of trouble with restructuring, with ripping things out that don't work and starting over. I tend to get attached, as if what I've written is CARVED IN STONE OMG and can't be changed. As if the story isn't fluid. And in some ways, to me, it isn't. This is one reason I don't like writing down fantasies and calling them stories - once I've given them a narrative shape, they can't be changed at whim. Once they're written down, I can no longer use them as fantasies, because they're locked into a series of events now, and this is how it happened (probably).
But yeah, changing tense, changing POV, changing the order in which things happen (not just in which they are told), can make a story work better.
This is all obvious stuff that I sometimes completely forget, until I run into a wall with a story and have to be reminded. Maybe the original idea is still sound, but it needs a few tweaks. Maybe it's not really very good on its own merits, but it leads somewhere awesome.
I need to be less afraid of making those kinds of changes - for me, they're always the last resort rather than an immediate option, because I am lazy, and if I've already written a thousand words in one direction, I really don't want to have to rip that out and start over. Especially not when I've got a deadline.
The other thing in torch's post that I found interesting was the section on POV, because I have been thinking a lot about POV lately. It used to be I simply "heard" the character narrating the story to me in my head, and that's when I would start writing. Nowadays, that happens to me a lot less; more and more lately, I start with ideas instead of opening lines, and the question of whose POV the story is in plagues me. It means I have to do a lot more thinking about what the story is about - not just plot-wise, but thematically, and why it would better to use Y's POV instead of X's.
Because I like single-POV stories. I really, really love tight third person POV, and one of the reasons for me - the main reason for me, I guess - is that it maintains narrative tension. In a romance, a lot of people choose to show both parties' points of view - I did it a lot myself when I first started writing - because of course we want to know what both parties are thinking!
But the thing is, for me, that leaches away a lot of the delicious tension of a romance. I mean, obviously, going into 99.44% of romance stories - pro or fan written - I am pretty sure Character A and Character B are going to wind up together (and when that surety is betrayed, I tend to not like the story; for a pro example, see Libby's London Merchant by Carla Kelly, in which the guy you think is the romantic hero turns out... not to be. I found that a very unsatisfying romance novel experience). In fanfic, mostly that worry is assuaged by pairing labels (not always, but mostly).
So the thing for me is, I already kinda know A and B are in love, or are going to be by the end of the story; that's why I'm reading the story in the first place. What I like is the uncertainty of the narrator, the "he doesn't love me, he could never love me, hey, wow, do you think he wants me the way I want him?" progression, and I feel like that awesome pining/realization template is completely undercut when you have character B going, "yes, yes, I love him so much, I am trying to win him over! Why isn't it working? Does he not love me?" or whatever. You would think that would double the pining enjoyment, but it doesn't, because instead of immersing myself completely in Character A's uncertainty, I'm getting Character B's refutation of it, and that switching keeps me aware of the story, puts up a distance between me and the characters that makes me less emotionally involved.
I realize this is totally a me-thing, how I read, but I much prefer staying with one character because I think it enhances the reading experience by keeping me immersed in the world of the story.
What I like in stories, and what I attempt to do (not always successfully), is to show, even from A's POV, how B really feels. So A is totally not getting that B is into him, but as a reader, you can see it, even if it takes A few thousand words to get there. That's not as easy to do as having a section from B's POV where B lays it all out for the reader, if not for A, but it's my preference, and it's fun and challenging (for values of fun and challenging that often include horrifyingly painful and hard) to write stories that way, and as a reader, for me, the emotional payoff is generally greater when I read stories written that way.
Obviously, there are stories that require dual or multiple points of view, and for me, those usually involve Action! or Adventure! or Mystery! Typically, a more casefilish story, or an action/adventure story, or a thriller or a mystery, can benefit from multiple narrators, especially if Our Heroes are separated and Events Are Happening in Many Locations. This keeps me as a reader up to speed without bringing the story to a screeching halt for long exposition dumps about What Happened to A in Prague while B was in Monte Carlo when Our Heroes Reunite on the rope bridge over the gorge in Borneo. Um. I don't know where that came from, but you know what I mean.
Since I tend to not write location-spanning thrillers so much as I write romances or casefiles or plotless character rambles, I generally stick to stories told from a single narrator's POV.
Obviously, mileage varies.
***