Comments on: The Devil’s in the Details

By: Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome

Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:01:30 +0000

I love that idea! It makes me feel much better about my first drafts.

By: Chicoy

Chicoy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:04:28 +0000

Part of my problem is that the character in question is actually a secondary one -someone my heroine is trying to rescue- so I’m never actually in his head.
What could distract him… that question could be really useful to me. Thanks. One thing I KNOW he’d like is a nice juicy plum. (Or ANYTHING that tastes better than stale bread and water, actually). Maybe I can work that into the story.

By: pcwrede

pcwrede — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:33:00 +0000

Alex – There are a lot of writers who have to go back and “layer in” different things in the second draft. Caroline Stevermer calls it doing a “sponge rubber dinosaur” first draft, that needs to be soaked in water overnight before it swells up to it’s proper size!

Chicory – Not dying is certainly a powerful motivation, but it does put most of the responsibility for moving the plot along on your villain or antagonist (because if he ever stops trying to kill your main character, said main character will have no more motivation to do anything…) If you can come up with something else he really wants (a girl, a trophy, an ice cream sunday, half an hour to read a good book…), that will probably help. Try asking yourself what would distract him – what is the thing that, if he saw it go by out of the corner of his eye while driving, he’d turn and look.

accio_aqualung – Sounds as if it’s possible you’re trying to self-correct, but if your first-readers are still finding your stuff too boring to finish, you may need to do a little more conscious work! Nonfiction biographies tend to be big on narrative summary – “telling” rather than “showing” – because they’re supposed to be factual, and with historical personages, most of their specific and detailed actions and dialog would have to be invented. (That is, you can say “General Grant ordered the cannons to fire,” but you wouldn’t say “‘Fire!’ Grant shouted hoarsely, waving at the artillery,” because you don’t actually know that he was hoarse or that he waved or even that he shouted “Fire.”)

By: accio_aqualung

accio_aqualung — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:11:15 +0000

Hm. It just dawned on me that I tend to narrate like the historian, lots of cohesive details that describe a person (height, weight, eye color) doing a thing (reason why, the thing, next step). At the end, well, most people don’t make it to the end of the books I read because other people find them boring. I must be one of the only people who reads civil war biographies for fun. But when I hit a wall with my writing, I’ll go raid the children’s and young adult sci-fi/fantasy sections at the library, devour everything, and be inspired for another few months or so. Perhaps I’ve been subconsciously self-correcting?

By: Chicoy

Chicoy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:13:06 +0000

At the moment I have a character who needs a hobby hobbies or SOMETHING because the way the story is written his only interest is not dying. (Which is a legitimate concern, but makes him come across as a little flat) so your post was very timely.

I had to grin at the examples of how being a lefty affects other arias of a person’s life. My mother gave up trying to teach me to use a sewing machine (you have to feed the cloth in backwards) and when I was invited to take a crocheting class, the poor instructor was a bit at a loss on how to teach me the stitches.

By: Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome

Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:12:39 +0000

I have the other problem – not including enough details, so I’ve solved that problem by going through and sprinkling details that add to the plot, setting or characterization somehow (yes, I’m using your 3 pillar ideas now but up until reading that post of yours I was doing it without knowing exactly what I was doing)

By: pcwrede

pcwrede — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:44:46 +0000

accio_aqualung – A lot depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your narrative, on a macro scale. Meaning, most genre fiction is trying to entertain the reader by telling a story; most historical nonfiction is trying to enlighten or inform while being accurate as to the facts. Quite a few of the folks I’ve known who write nonfiction (whether they’re journalists or scholars) have a bit of trouble making the initial jump from nonfiction to fiction, in part because they have a lot of practice doing some writing techniques, but little or no practice with others. (You put your finger right on it with the line about “…woefully short on pacing, seminal action climaxes and the twist at the end…”)

As always, the first step in fixing the problem is diagosis – it’s really hard to straighten out a problem if you aren’t really sure what the problem is.

As for Mendanbar and Cimorene – a) it’s been way too long since I wrote them for me to remember random tidbits, and b) I don’t construct my characters in that way anyway. More on this in a couple of days, I think…

By: accio_aqualung

accio_aqualung — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:05:07 +0000

Hm, I think you brought up something important that I never realized. By training, I am an historian and have spent more time than any sane person should poring over battlefield narrations and trying to humanize people like Stonewall Jackson from their quirks and foibles. Books like these are also woefully short on pacing, seminal action climaxes and the twist at the end where you find out it was the sidekick whodunit.

Actually, this really made some of my own quirks and foibles fall into place and make so much more sense.

Any random tidbits about Mendanbar and Cimorene?