On main characters.
Lifting the veil on a writing life #12
Very brief audio this week, time slipped away from me.
More in the written post (one I prepared earlier!), below.
First up, some news, my short story collection is free anywhere you can buy ebooks. Just for a few more days, so if you haven’t read any of my fiction, this would be a great taster.
Just over one minute of my voice this week!
Last week I was epiphany central so in today’s update, I thought I’d share some of the obstacles I’ve been up against.
For this novel, I’m retrospectively using T.L.Bodine’s horror story template I found HERE which is also in PLOTTR.
This template has fifteen beats and as regular listeners will know I’ve been rewriting Beat Seven for what feels like an epoch. This is the key “Beat” in the book, the halfway point in the story.
To break it down, my issues with this section are;
I’ve taken one plotline away.
Most of the word count of the book is here, around 20,000 in an 80,000-word novel, this is where most of the action happens.
My MC (main character) keeps running out of the scenes she is in.
The first two are all about adding scenes that work for the story, but number three…
I’ve begun to think my MC is a commitmentphobe, she’s always dashing through the woods to get between two different places.
I’ve written her out of these scenes, and because of its first-person point of view, the scene then ends.
This is one of the problems of being a pantser.
A pantser is a term most commonly applied to fiction writers, especially novelists, who write their stories "by the seat of their pants." The opposite would be a plotter, or someone who uses outlines to help plot out their novels.
A pantser starts writing, possibly with a few ideas of scenes and thread of a story, maybe even an ending. This discovery method of writing suits me because it means I don’t get bored (ADHD brain) and it’s exciting (dopamine fix). But there’s a lot of work at the editing and rewriting stage.
Plotters on the other hand tend to do a lot of the work before they start writing and therefore generally have fewer structural fixes to do.
Much of my time this week after printing out was shuffling the scenes to a new order, so they make more sense. And each time my MC wants to run away, I’m highlighting it in yellow.
REPEAT AFTER ME;
The process is its own reward. The process is its own reward. The process is its own reward.
This phrase is swiftly becoming a bit of a mantra. What have you been telling yourself recently?
This week I’m sharing a photo from the school playground. I love how these raindrops look suspended in motion.
Wishing you strength in your endeavours.
Susan.
I used to be a hardcore pantser...and I would scenes write out of order....and then sit in a corner, softly weeping. Somewhere along the way, I became a strange combination...I'll 'discover' for a bit, then stop and do a bit of plot-storming. I wish I could say it results in cleaner early drafts, but I'd be lying. The plot bunnies...oh, the plot bunnies.....*sigh*. I'm currently trying to detangle a mess I left for myself a few years ago. I get bored to tears with detailed outlines, but I do see the attraction of having one. :DS
Big time ‘pantser’ here. I can’t imagine writing any other way.
I’m also a ‘magpie’ or ‘bower bird’ writer, where my notebooks are crammed with snippets of images, or fragments of dialogue that I’ve collected over the years.
I then weave, quite deftly I’ll add, these nuggets into the narrative. (*Very* Jupiter in Virgo).
Which is another way of understanding how much my beyond-time-and-space unconscious oversees and already ‘knows’ the completed structure of the book--which is sort of mind-blowing--thus that term again: the spooky art.
What I’m repeating to myself (otherwise I’d be working on this on my deathbed) is FINAL DEADLINE: HALLOWEEN. (I need that tattooed on my forehead).
Great post, Susan. Thank you! And carry on with your MC’s vanishing acts, they ARE leading her somewhere.