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Impressions after a weekend writing. Well, writing, I only got about 3k (approaching the 60k mark!) and have a new finished chapter.

The chapter is basically an introduction between the two bad people of the book. Totally different characters, different motives. They are not going to get along well! In this chapter as one of them is a powerful woman and the other one a lowly man, things might seem to go the woman’s way, but in fact, she gets nothing – which is uncharacteristic of her – and she comes out as the looser (well, to me she’s the looser. If she’s not to my alpha reader, I’ll have to fix that in the rewrites).

Nice scene to write – lots of tension (including physical 🙂 ), lots of potential for conflict.

I’m a little concerned that I might be making the male viewpoint more likeable than he should really be. This is a bad guy, willing to do anything it takes to acchieve his goal. Sure, you can understand him. In fact, I want the reader to understand, but you shouldn’t come to like him. Right now, he’s looking like a lovesick boy who only wants to go after the girl he likes. That’s becoming a little tiresome. I guess that’s my reaction to the alpha reader stating that “she doesn’t like him at all” from the first chapters. I’m afraid I’m actually making up for that by making him too likeable – and less interesting right now. Rewrites, rewrites…

 

This is writingexuses day, so I’ll ramble a little about today’s topic : how not to be influenced by others. This is a big topic for me. Not so as a writer – I don’t think I’m writing to look like someone else (well, I don’t have the required skill for that, not yet anyway). The real trap for me here is voice. I’m very conscious that I’m tending to speak like an assemblage of people from series. I often quote others intonation for intonation. Be it Chandler from Friends (“Could this be any awkward?”) or O Brian when I’m swearing (bloody computer!). My conversation is a patchwork of other people’s phrases. I think I’m picking up some of Howard Tayler manierism too (“panel, panel, panel, punchline”).

This could become quite a problem because those character voices I’m hearing in my head as I write actually do sound like people from the series. I already talked about Lwaxana Troi’s unwanted cameo here. This is something I’ll have to be really careful about.

Well, when you know where a trap is, you’re less likely to fall into that trap, but you can still fall into it.

 

Last topic for the day : I have new ideas coming for the next book. It’s nice to see that other parts of my mind are working on something else. I think those ideas could give something cool – maybe not that original, but still cool.

I intentionally cut out every religious aspect from the current book – this represents the atheist part of my mind – religion is not needed for a society to function.

On the next book, I’ll try to talk about religion and what I think bad religion can come to. I plan to show that through a god’s eye. I know, erikson does it, sanderson does it, and probably others too. As I said, it’s not that original, but I hope that the rendition will be.

I plan to start planning that book at the same time I’m doing editing on the last one. This will give me something else to think about – editing is tedious business. I’ll try to outline more for the next book. Discovery writing is good, but I have to try something else in order to know if I like it or not.

The jury will have to give it’s decision on that – I tend to think that I’ll make a detailed outline only to have my writing completely go astray. Personal opinion before I even try to do it. We’ll see in a few months?

 

Ouch, today’s comments were big! If you’re wondering, that piece is around 700 words. that’s 1/1000 of the million I’m supposed to write, great!

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