There's something that has always dissatisfied me about my fiction. I've known that something was wrong, but have been unable to fix it, in part because I couldn't identify it. It plagued me all through the writing of Smiley and the Hero, and I have begun to run across it in the new book, too.
Last night I figured out what it was: I have trouble expressing the emotional centers of the characters. This is a problem I have in real life, and so I give it to all my characters as well; they struggle to express the intensity of emotion, and so over-explain and over-express, babbling on and on in a kind of pandering tone about what it is they're feeling.
I'm not sure how to fix this yet. I'm don't really know how to convey emotion through my writing in a way that is both affecting and authentic. But now that I've identified what the problem is, I can try to fix it.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
What's a Chapter?
I boggle at writers who talk about how maybe sitting down to write "a chapter" is a bit too daunting for one session, and recommend breaking up the task into smaller sessions.
A chapter? In a day?!
I recently listened to a pair of accomplished writers try to answer the question for an audience member of how long a chapter ought to be. They agreed that "as long as it needs to be" is the complicated answer, and "5000 words" was the short answer.
5000 words in a day is a hell of a lot of writing. I've been managing about 1500 a day (mainly to make up for days in which I have other commitments that prevent me from making my 1000 word/day goal. My chapters are longer still, though. The last one was 13,000 words, the length of an entire short story. I'm learning as I go how to flesh out character motivation, background, physical description, and that makes the action take longer. But I am pretty damn sure it's also making my writing better as well, and more enjoyable to read. But it means that a single chapter of the book takes me two weeks to write.
My first draft of my previous book was only about forty thousand words, written on-again, off-again, over a period of about a year. Until I began this longer project, I had no real concept of just how long it took to write a novel. It's work, hard work. I would venture to say that I have worked harder on this book than I have worked on anything else in my entire life. Two-week-long chapters notwithstanding.
My philosophy on chapters has been that if a paragraph completes a thought, then a chapter completes an action. At the end of it, the character should have taken a full step either toward or away from his goal. I guess in my book, the characters are just really slow steppers.
A chapter? In a day?!
I recently listened to a pair of accomplished writers try to answer the question for an audience member of how long a chapter ought to be. They agreed that "as long as it needs to be" is the complicated answer, and "5000 words" was the short answer.
5000 words in a day is a hell of a lot of writing. I've been managing about 1500 a day (mainly to make up for days in which I have other commitments that prevent me from making my 1000 word/day goal. My chapters are longer still, though. The last one was 13,000 words, the length of an entire short story. I'm learning as I go how to flesh out character motivation, background, physical description, and that makes the action take longer. But I am pretty damn sure it's also making my writing better as well, and more enjoyable to read. But it means that a single chapter of the book takes me two weeks to write.
My first draft of my previous book was only about forty thousand words, written on-again, off-again, over a period of about a year. Until I began this longer project, I had no real concept of just how long it took to write a novel. It's work, hard work. I would venture to say that I have worked harder on this book than I have worked on anything else in my entire life. Two-week-long chapters notwithstanding.
My philosophy on chapters has been that if a paragraph completes a thought, then a chapter completes an action. At the end of it, the character should have taken a full step either toward or away from his goal. I guess in my book, the characters are just really slow steppers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)