Writing

Valenta's Choice

Making some progress on this one. I hate the title, though. I'll have to come up with something better. In the meantime, Valenta is working in Imelda's House of Pleasure and has just discovered that she's going through another period of rapid color change (her coat's getting brighter; gold on her body, green on her head and shoulders). This is not a good thing. She's also got a mysterious human visitor. He appears to be a townie, which is very odd since they don't generally frequent the establishments on the Port side of the line. She has no idea just how odd a visitor he's going to turn out to be.

Recent Words: 524

Total Words: 3,135

On Learning to Write Novels

I read Richard Parks' "The First Law of Power" last night in the latest Realms. Terrific story, I might add. I then asked him if THE ARROW WAY (his novel in progress) is the logical continuation of the story (read the story, and you'll know what I mean). Yep, it is.

I was thinking about this last night (before I'd gotten his answer) and it occured to me that Richard's novel can be described in a single sentence. Well, what do you know? They're right! I've had people tell me that if you can't sum it up in a single sentence, it's not tight enough. (Or, possibly more appropriate to this discussion, that you don't really know what it's about.) Now, I don't mean tell all the action and relationships and adventures in a sentence, but just what it's about.

When I said the other day that it felt like my novel had gotten so big (story-wise, not words on paper-wise) that it came crashing down around my feet, I think that's because I'm not really sure what it's about. I know something of the characters (some are merely sketches, others are fairly well fleshed out) and something of the action (I have whole visual scenes in my head and some even on paper) and some notion of where it starts out and where it ends up and how the characters change between start and finish. What I don't really understand is the heart of the story I'm trying to tell.

This, I'm finding, is one of the differences between writing short stories and novels (at least for me). Sometimes I start writing with a definite goal in mind. Sometimes, however, I start with nothing more than a cool beginning and just write until I get somewhere. Somewhere along the way I finally see where I should be heading (this is when I find the 'heart') and I scrap what I have to and get on with it. In a short story, I might only be scrapping 2k words, if that much. The 'cost' of this kind of thing with a novel is much greater.

So, this is my novel related task while I'm finishing "Valenta". Try to figure out/decide just what story I'm trying to tell and then see how things fall out from there.