pjthompson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pjthompson) wrote2005-07-14 04:02 pm
pjthompson) wrote2005-07-14 04:02 pm
Entry tags:
A whiter shade of pale
Sleep: it's a wonderful thing. I highly recommend it. I got almost a full night last night, enough so that I'm not feeling quite so wuzzy and tender today.
I'm closing in on the end of chapter 24, too. Probably finish up tomorrow. I've been kind of dragging my heels, as this chapter is the start of a chain reaction of Doing Bad Stuff to my characters. I always hesitate to hurt them, to be the bad guy. Once I launch myself on that course, though, I can get pretty ruthless. A friend once said, "For someone so tender-hearted towards her characters you wind up putting them through hell." Not always, but...yeah.
Another friend, one of those organized-as-opposed-to-organic writers, laughed at my hesitance. "They aren't real people, Pam."
Well, yeah, they are. Not really real. I don't expect them to walk through the door, don't believe they have an existence separate from the pages of my book and the imaginations touched by them, but they are real. In their own way.
Writing lesson of the day: Beware the dreaded everyone-I-like-is-noble syndrome. My novel's MC has shading, I believe. He acts in contradictory and less-than-noble ways; fails to always do the right thing; gives into his baser instincts. Sometimes. But sometimes those surrounding him, the ones he cares for and who care for him, seem too good to be true. They may flare briefly with irrationality or anger or other salty emotions, but they seem to swing back to center too quickly. I don't always give them enough time or energy in human terms to work through things.
Some of this is a consequence of the first draft process and can be addressed in rewrites. But it's a persistent tendency I have to be on the watch for. Like today. Note to self: add in more human frailty next time around.
The other curious thing is that I don't think I have trouble shading the villains in my novels, giving them some sympathetic aspects. Dark areas in the heroes, places of light in the villains—it's just those folks in the middle who need tweaking.
Kind of like life?
I'm closing in on the end of chapter 24, too. Probably finish up tomorrow. I've been kind of dragging my heels, as this chapter is the start of a chain reaction of Doing Bad Stuff to my characters. I always hesitate to hurt them, to be the bad guy. Once I launch myself on that course, though, I can get pretty ruthless. A friend once said, "For someone so tender-hearted towards her characters you wind up putting them through hell." Not always, but...yeah.
Another friend, one of those organized-as-opposed-to-organic writers, laughed at my hesitance. "They aren't real people, Pam."
Well, yeah, they are. Not really real. I don't expect them to walk through the door, don't believe they have an existence separate from the pages of my book and the imaginations touched by them, but they are real. In their own way.
Writing lesson of the day: Beware the dreaded everyone-I-like-is-noble syndrome. My novel's MC has shading, I believe. He acts in contradictory and less-than-noble ways; fails to always do the right thing; gives into his baser instincts. Sometimes. But sometimes those surrounding him, the ones he cares for and who care for him, seem too good to be true. They may flare briefly with irrationality or anger or other salty emotions, but they seem to swing back to center too quickly. I don't always give them enough time or energy in human terms to work through things.
Some of this is a consequence of the first draft process and can be addressed in rewrites. But it's a persistent tendency I have to be on the watch for. Like today. Note to self: add in more human frailty next time around.
The other curious thing is that I don't think I have trouble shading the villains in my novels, giving them some sympathetic aspects. Dark areas in the heroes, places of light in the villains—it's just those folks in the middle who need tweaking.
Kind of like life?
no subject
But because I tend to mingle genres all over the place, the nookie stands out and it gets labelled "romance". :/ A lot of hardcore scifi publishers won't touch stuff with nookie unless it's gross Heinlein-Oedipal-crap. And I don't do enough tech-talk to be hardcore scifi anyway. My medieval worlds tend to be low or no magic, but there's smooching so they get stuck with romance.
I really need to find a cross-genre publisher who likes long tomes.
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Someone really needs to open a cross-genre publisher that doesn't do only ebooks. Every time I hear a rumour of a potential good one, it's e-only. Bah. I don't even read ebooks. I'm not opposed to having them in conjunction with print but I don't want e-only.
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Yep. I don't think it's a good fit, but at least she asked for the whole book after reading the first 60.
Yeah, I'd say that's a positive--and in the "not sucking" category. :-) Anna's got a rep for being nice to us writer folks.
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