z

Young Writers Society


How do I not move along to quickly in a book i'm writing?



User avatar



Gender: None specified
Points: 389
Reviews: 1
Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:30 pm
View Likes
HutchesonHS says...



Ok, so in a lot of my books I write I feel like the story is moving along to quickly and by page ten they are getting into conflicts without having enough things introduced into the story. The action happens to fast and I don't know how to make my stories better! Please help!
  





User avatar
1272 Reviews



Gender: Other
Points: 89625
Reviews: 1272
Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:55 pm
View Likes
Rosendorn says...



Try this.

Additions:

1- Flesh out your characters more. Character interactions should drive the story and make the plots different. You can't rely on stock ideas for how they'll react; you have to figure out their backstories, lives, and how they'd react to situations so you have interactions that basically can't be rushed through, because you have to account for character interactions.

2- Learn to find things beside major conflicts interesting. Ie- Day to day stuff is interesting, travel scenes are interesting, repercussions are interesting. If you find these things interesting, you are more likely to write them, in turn slowing the story down.

3- Don't summarize. Break as much as you can into full scenes. You can turn a 100 word summary for an important conversation into a 1,000 word scene, and end up with a much better piece of prose as a result. Because you turned it into a scene, you have more information you just plain old wouldn't have gotten. You'll probably go too far with this for awhile, but that's alright.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





User avatar
560 Reviews



Gender: None specified
Points: 30438
Reviews: 560
Tue Feb 18, 2014 1:59 am
View Likes
Tenyo says...



Hmm, this is an interesting one. I think it depends on what happens after page ten.


Letting it be

You're going to rewrite the beginning of your novel at least three times before you finish it. It will happen. It's an inevitable truth. Characters will change names without you noticing, children will age seven years in four months, and wherever you intended to start won't be where you actually start once the first draft is done.

Just leave it as it is and focus on getting to the end of the novel. Then you can come back and decide on a sturdy beginning, which may be five chapters before you originally thought, or you might scrap the first three and start further in.

You can come back, edit and buff out all the details once you've got the rest of the novel nailed down.

Harnessing the conflict

This is your other option, if you go with it as a stylistic thing. Having conflict on page ten isn't always a bad thing. Jumping straight into a conflict has the disadvantage that you don't have the 'normal world' setting in which to introduce your characters first. However the great thing is that the direty of the situation means that revealing the character later on can have a much sharper impact.

War movies (and most disaster movies) tend to follow that pattern, with people thrown straight into the line of fire and it's not until after a few people have died that they sit and talk, and you get to see what makes them human. Disaster movies usually have an opening scene or two first.

Either way

Don't worry about it. Finish your novel and then come back to write the beginning. Forcing yourself to go through all the details can actually dull the excitement of the novel, when most of these will develop over time anyway, and the less time you spend on the beginning now, the more flexible and willing to adapt you'll be later in the novel.
We were born to be amazing.
  





User avatar
49 Reviews



Gender: Female
Points: 3000
Reviews: 49
Mon Mar 03, 2014 5:09 am
View Likes
wakarimasen says...



Rosey Unicorn wrote:
3- Don't summarize. Break as much as you can into full scenes. You can turn a 100 word summary for an important conversation into a 1,000 word scene, and end up with a much better piece of prose as a result. Because you turned it into a scene, you have more information you just plain old wouldn't have gotten. You'll probably go too far with this for awhile, but that's alright.


I'm so glad I read this, because that's exactly what I know I have to do with novelette that I've been writing for the last two weeks. There's this one chapter where I wrote out a ginormous summary. Someone did advise me that I should balance out dialogue and describing what people said without quoting them in my stories, so I guess that was on my subconscious and I went a bit overboard! :smt003

But I think that at this point, all I need to do is get the whole story onto paper and then I'll go back and give that individual chapter some TLC. That way, I won't lose my train of thought in telling the rest of the story.

With any luck, after I flesh it out, what was two statement-sized pages could be several more. Maybe it wouldn't even be considered a novelette anymore.... :P
  





User avatar
1272 Reviews



Gender: Other
Points: 89625
Reviews: 1272
Thu Mar 06, 2014 2:09 am
View Likes
Rosendorn says...



The primary times I summarize:

1- Travel scenes where it's going over the same terrain over and over again. Tolkien could get away with describing the landscape in detail, but times have changed.

As soon as it's something actually relevant to the plot, such as discovering a sign of what they're tracking, a new important location, or something out of the ordinary (a monster or attack), switch to scene.

2- Times the character is alone and not doing anything to drive the plot forward (and therefore generally not encountering anything but internal conflict).

A character alone and not doing anything is usually a character brooding, going over a lot of back and forth, and not really doing anything all that interesting. It's good to show a character alone, and show how they behave when nobody's watching, but there is no need to show every single action and every single thought when they are alone until they start moving again.

Day to day stuff when absolutely nothing happens is a full-out skip. There is no need to show day to day unless you really, really want to establish what normal is, but unless there's something driving the plot... best to leave it out.

One thing to remember is even really short conversations when you're just having characters run into each other can be majorly defining moments. Do they linger? Glare at each other? Shrink back? Kiss despite a split lip and the taste of blood in their mouth, just in case (of what)? Are purely professional? The list goes on. And each one of those things says something.

You often show more of your character's life, personality, and attitudes more by including little details like that than summarizing. Some summaries can be extremely telling, especially when you're narrating it in the character's very distinct voice, but breaking down the scene is often better, especially when you're trying to get the hang of your character.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  








i like that the title of dr jekyll and mr hyde makes a clear stance that the embodiment of one’s own evil doesn’t get a claim to the doctorate
— waywardxwallflower