Writing

[pameladean]

I keep forgetting to make any notes about this, either. I'm still laboring away on Chapter Three. I seem able to do about two or three hundred words a day, and don't reliably do more if I schedule more times for staring at the computer. This is okay for the moment, though things will have to speed up soon. Raphael has read the book chapter by chapter; Eric is reading it in smaller rougher bits, which is very useful to my decayed confidence; and David and Lydy, plus people not in my household, will read the entire thing when there is one, a matter -- the existence of a finished book, that is -- that I am more confident about now than I was a month ago.

I'm most pleased about the way that lines from invented plays do come to mind when they are needed, although the tendency of the characters to sneer at some of them is probably going to have to be damped down at some point.

I'm a little worried that the number of viewpoint characters is going to multiply uncontrollably. My last three books were all tight-third, one viewpoint, so using three different ones for this book seemed quite a stretch. I have ended up with four already (a habit taken from my Liavek short stories; somebody I had not planned to use is somebody whose viewpoint I am very accustomed to using, and suddenly there it was, and I could not resist), and can dimly foresee a point in the plot where another two might be useful. Eeeeeep.

Pamela

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Ooh, invented plays.

200 words a day steadily soon adds up.

POV multiplication is weird. I think POV generally is one of those things where most of the ways of thinking about it come from literary criticism and therefore picking it up from the wrong end for writing. I hope you are soon happy with the way yours is working for you and for the story. POV overlaps a whole lot with a lot of mode stuff about where you're standing to tell the story and what assumptions you can make. I hope you have a lot of fun with it.

I'm finding omniscient really strange -- what's called omniscient is actually about six different things. I have a new theory about it, which is that there was an omniscient narrator voice, as used by Austen and Trollope, and Dickens picked it up, dropped and broke it, making his form of omniscient which developed into the detested Bestseller Omniscient as seen today.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Good luck. I like having lots of readers at various stages of draft.

B