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My condolences
Nov. 14th, 2008 02:57 amMade good writing progress tonight.
I had this dilemma: a major set-piece, meticulously blocked and fairly thrilling...which necessarily happened while my viewpoint character was stuck far away in a windowless room. I might have found a way to get him there, but there were issues of simultaneity — my protagonist had to do X while Y was happening in the big scene. I might have had it happen off-screen, and related the events in later dialogue, but that would have killed the immediacy. So I bent my rules, and started writing "an account of" the big event, as though the book's author had included a big block quote from somebody else's work.
The problem was, I had no idea why this second viewpoint character — a soldier — was writing. Who was he writing for? Was this an interview, or did the author ask him to write down what he saw, or had he written a diary? Yes, he was able to tell everything that happened, but it was like I'd shoved him on-stage with a script in his hand — there was no emotional context, no weight. And I wasn't happy with cheating by introducing a second viewpoint character this late in the story.
Then I realized that one of the few bits of backstory I had for this character was that his sweetheart had left him for another man. Oho! I retroactively turned the other man into his (current) commanding officer, set him up to die during the big scene, and suddenly the chapter became a condolence letter — "I share your grief; let me tell you how heroically your husband died, since I was there" — with all these great complicated undertones. Is he still bitter? Is he damning with faint praise, while casually playing up his own deeds? Is he trying to move back in, now that the competition is gone? Is he frankly lying? I'd already included a new-viewpoint letter in the first half of the book, so this didn't feel like cheating, and it gave my soldier an affect (a nice juicy one) while telling his story. Suddenly the chapter is interesting to me.
So, after three nights of forcing myself to write something I wasn't committed to, which felt like slogging through snowbanks, I knocked off two and a half pages tonight, with a solid plan for tomorrow. Woohoo.
I had this dilemma: a major set-piece, meticulously blocked and fairly thrilling...which necessarily happened while my viewpoint character was stuck far away in a windowless room. I might have found a way to get him there, but there were issues of simultaneity — my protagonist had to do X while Y was happening in the big scene. I might have had it happen off-screen, and related the events in later dialogue, but that would have killed the immediacy. So I bent my rules, and started writing "an account of" the big event, as though the book's author had included a big block quote from somebody else's work.
The problem was, I had no idea why this second viewpoint character — a soldier — was writing. Who was he writing for? Was this an interview, or did the author ask him to write down what he saw, or had he written a diary? Yes, he was able to tell everything that happened, but it was like I'd shoved him on-stage with a script in his hand — there was no emotional context, no weight. And I wasn't happy with cheating by introducing a second viewpoint character this late in the story.
Then I realized that one of the few bits of backstory I had for this character was that his sweetheart had left him for another man. Oho! I retroactively turned the other man into his (current) commanding officer, set him up to die during the big scene, and suddenly the chapter became a condolence letter — "I share your grief; let me tell you how heroically your husband died, since I was there" — with all these great complicated undertones. Is he still bitter? Is he damning with faint praise, while casually playing up his own deeds? Is he trying to move back in, now that the competition is gone? Is he frankly lying? I'd already included a new-viewpoint letter in the first half of the book, so this didn't feel like cheating, and it gave my soldier an affect (a nice juicy one) while telling his story. Suddenly the chapter is interesting to me.
So, after three nights of forcing myself to write something I wasn't committed to, which felt like slogging through snowbanks, I knocked off two and a half pages tonight, with a solid plan for tomorrow. Woohoo.
