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Cal's Hyde Park Corner Soapbox Oration #2



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Sat Dec 23, 2006 2:58 am
Caligula's Launderette says...



Cal's Hyde Park Corner Soapbox

The Business

1. Pitch.

You must consider the emotional investment you put into writing. There are all sorts of metaphors about a piece of writing being your baby. I particularly favor the Capote quote that smaur put forth for quote of the week. “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.”

The writer must be prepared to work as hard as you want to get towards your ideal end product. Know how much you are willing to give to your project.

If you know what mood you want in your piece, are you going to work harder than usual to achieve it? Be prepared to experience the spectrum of human emotions while writing. Foremost, understand that how much you put into the work will dictate the output.

2. Ooops!


Don’t bite off more than you can chew. At it’s worst this can lead you to stop progress and scrap your work, and that’s not something you want.

Large mouthfuls include:

- too many characters; this is a particular pitfall of mine, silly me. ;)
- too many things that need constant explication, like sub-plots
- info-dumps, *slays those*
- a number of Hero Syndromes, i.e. a protagonist has gone from liked to worshiped
- get so caught up in the formation of your story, and all the research that you forget or don’t actually write it. This is quite easy to do in fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction.

3. Form follows Function.

Snoink is particularly skilled at this. What it means is that if you have a story divided into chapters, or parts, or whatevers, analyze each of them separately at the emotion content in each. If part of the character is dragging perhaps chop up that chapter into two, add more action; the big thing is to keep your emotional content consistent.

Characters need recovery, if they have just been on a rampant arc of action, give them time to pause and reflect. It doesn’t have to be as long as the action.

FREAK is divided into parts, and from there chapters, and if you look at the chapters singularly you will find that the emotional consistency remains at a very high level, and does not tend to change. Snoink does not over exert her characters. Overall, reading FREAK is like riding a rollercoaster at Six Flags. A really, really fun rollercoaster.

Yours,
Cal.


Coming up next, Oration #3: The Characters
Last edited by Caligula's Launderette on Sat Dec 23, 2006 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Fraser: Stop stealing the blanket.
[Diefenbaker whines]
Fraser: You're an Arctic Wolf, for God's sake.
(Due South)

Hatter: Do I need a reason to help a pretty girl in a very wet dress? (Alice)

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Sat Dec 23, 2006 3:46 am
Sam says...



I liked Snoinkus' tip: It's okay to be boring. Boring scenes are good.

Hehe, I love your soapboxes! Very good advice, and fun to read. :D
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Sat Dec 23, 2006 11:12 am
Swires says...



Nice advice there.
Previously known as "Phorcys"
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Sat Dec 23, 2006 9:40 pm
Snoink says...



Hehehe... I imitated it from Jane Austen. Look at Pride and Prejudice (which happens to be my favorite book of hers, lol) and every chapter there is a short story in itself, having a beginning, middle, and end. So instead of just writing the chapters as chapters, she wrote them as short stories, leading naturally to the next short story. :D So it remains intense without sputtering off and dying.
Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.

"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly." ~ Richard Bach

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Daddy Long Legs are more closely related to crabs than spiders and somehow the idea of crablike creatures with spider legs that have escaped the entrappings of the primordial sea and now crawl over land and can walk up and down walls and ceilings creeps me more than I can adequately describe.
— Snoink