Thursday, July 10, 2014

Giving 27 secondary characters a personality.

Well I struggled yesterday, though I spent most of the day trying to progress.  Did only about 25 pages instead of the assigned 50 pages.  So I have another day of collating to do.

Not sure why.  It was just was slower.  The last fifty pages are the accumulation of everything that has come before.

I moved a few things around, and I'm thinking of moving a couple more things around.  There were a lot of action scenes, and they tend to need more attention than just the usual narrative.

The basic framework is there, so I want to be careful.

The biggest change I'm contemplating is taking the scene where the two main characters, uh, consummate their love, from page 150 to page 185, closer to the end.  It should have been easy, but when I did it, the bricks started falling out of the wall.

Bren wanted me to have more conflict between the lovers, but I'm leery of artificial conflict -- it's one of the things that drive me nuts about books and shows I'd otherwise like.

I also have maybe a few too many action scenes in a row, and I'm looking for a way to break them up  a little.

I'll look at it again when I'm finished with this collating.  Like I said, I have a couple of weeks of just being able to polish the book.

I've got 27 characters in the "search party" and in the rewrite I've been giving trying to give more of them a little bit more of personality.  The main difference is that I had the "anti-Indian" and "pro-Indian" differences within the same family, and now have separated them into two distinct camps.  I want to give a few more short scenes to the bad guys to show just how bad they are, and a few more scenes of poetic justice as they meet their demise.

The biggest thing I can do in the final rewrite is add in a few more descriptive and or telling details, to make it all seem more real.   To add to the verisimilitude, make the reader feel like he or she is there. 

For instance, when I read my two chapters to writer's group, I was aware that I had a lot of inner dialogue, and I mentioned that concern.

Gary, who can be pretty tough, said, "No, the inner dialogue is fine, but you might want to show a little more of what is happening outside his head too."

Well, the characters are on a trail-ride, so it shouldn't be that hard to put in some sensory detail.  That kind of thing.

I do feel like it is this final process that makes a book.  The closer I get, the closer I get.

1 comment:

Bren said...

Yes, Gary can be tough, but if he says it's fine, he's right. I agree that there needs to be more outside the stuff going on.

You realize the story doesn't need sex, right? The relationship conflict is not artificial if it comes from within the characters. I have an idea we can talk about if you like.