What a pleasant surprise on this Thursday and thank you so much for the suggestions! Lots of homework for me to follow up in the next couple of weeks! I especially love the idea of reading character 1's thread sequentially (instead of jumping back and forth between 1 & 2) and have a feel of how it flows. Maybe character 2 shoul…
What a pleasant surprise on this Thursday and thank you so much for the suggestions! Lots of homework for me to follow up in the next couple of weeks! I especially love the idea of reading character 1's thread sequentially (instead of jumping back and forth between 1 & 2) and have a feel of how it flows. Maybe character 2 should be in another book. I will make a decision.
I also love the idea of physically mapping out the intersections. I'll put my cork board (and reader's ears) to (hopefully) good use!
Thanks story club for being such a warm and long-attention span place. My Shangri-La in these tumultuous times!
This is such an interesting conundrum. I have a draft of a novel i’ve worked on for years, and it has this same problem. I started ouy writing a kind of 4-person pov ensemble-of-voices novel. Struggled along with it. Realized two of the characters were very important, one not very, one not at all. So much for outlining a plot/concept and sticking to it rigidly. I eliminated one of the characters and her whole story line. The not-very-important character i quickly demoted to secondary background. Then i focused on the two really important characters, and the novel started working much better. But THEN a different secondary character started muscling in. I need a big mallet to beat some of these guys off! Years later, I’m still struggling with the novel. I’ll stop for a while and do other stuff, then get lured back to this crazy obsessive project again. My characters are writing ME. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
I'm also on the Definitely Last Draft of a novel I've been living with for too many years. The character people like the most just walked cheekily into chapter 2 uninvited and stuck around. He is great fun to work with. But I have to remind him now and then that he serves the story and not the other way around. Like you, I've also rebalanced the story quite a bit over the various drafts. Plot too complex, or story maybe too dark. Ya. I definitely feel you!
"Yay, oh yay" spoke the novelists, wildly outstretching and lifting the limbs of their arms towards the sky and seeking to see into the blue yonder beyond, "our prayers are answered now that our created characters have taken over development of their stories!"
Quite a notion Carroll, conjuring with which sets the mind boggling 🤣
greetings from just-another-physicist-on-Story-Club! Seems like your beautiful question got you a few new items in your reading list, hope you'll forgive me for one more suggestion. This article about physicists-writers someone linked (here in SC? or somewhere else? I forgot) is worth reading:
A quote from it: "Novelists do not merely gaze inward to create new forms or invent new ways of saying. They look outward, too. They direct their experiments toward the greater patterns of the world. They also stretch space and time, and quiz the substance of reality."
So maybe there is a reason why time stretches and compresses in you novel depending on the point of view?
Hi George!
What a pleasant surprise on this Thursday and thank you so much for the suggestions! Lots of homework for me to follow up in the next couple of weeks! I especially love the idea of reading character 1's thread sequentially (instead of jumping back and forth between 1 & 2) and have a feel of how it flows. Maybe character 2 should be in another book. I will make a decision.
I also love the idea of physically mapping out the intersections. I'll put my cork board (and reader's ears) to (hopefully) good use!
Thanks story club for being such a warm and long-attention span place. My Shangri-La in these tumultuous times!
This is such an interesting conundrum. I have a draft of a novel i’ve worked on for years, and it has this same problem. I started ouy writing a kind of 4-person pov ensemble-of-voices novel. Struggled along with it. Realized two of the characters were very important, one not very, one not at all. So much for outlining a plot/concept and sticking to it rigidly. I eliminated one of the characters and her whole story line. The not-very-important character i quickly demoted to secondary background. Then i focused on the two really important characters, and the novel started working much better. But THEN a different secondary character started muscling in. I need a big mallet to beat some of these guys off! Years later, I’m still struggling with the novel. I’ll stop for a while and do other stuff, then get lured back to this crazy obsessive project again. My characters are writing ME. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
I'm also on the Definitely Last Draft of a novel I've been living with for too many years. The character people like the most just walked cheekily into chapter 2 uninvited and stuck around. He is great fun to work with. But I have to remind him now and then that he serves the story and not the other way around. Like you, I've also rebalanced the story quite a bit over the various drafts. Plot too complex, or story maybe too dark. Ya. I definitely feel you!
Sounds like your book is alive and kicking!
Are you sure about that? It seems to me to be an answer to prayer when characters take over the development of the story.
"Yay, oh yay" spoke the novelists, wildly outstretching and lifting the limbs of their arms towards the sky and seeking to see into the blue yonder beyond, "our prayers are answered now that our created characters have taken over development of their stories!"
Quite a notion Carroll, conjuring with which sets the mind boggling 🤣
Both/and 😬
Dear Anika,
greetings from just-another-physicist-on-Story-Club! Seems like your beautiful question got you a few new items in your reading list, hope you'll forgive me for one more suggestion. This article about physicists-writers someone linked (here in SC? or somewhere else? I forgot) is worth reading:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-novel-became-a-laboratory-for-experimental-physics
A quote from it: "Novelists do not merely gaze inward to create new forms or invent new ways of saying. They look outward, too. They direct their experiments toward the greater patterns of the world. They also stretch space and time, and quiz the substance of reality."
So maybe there is a reason why time stretches and compresses in you novel depending on the point of view?
Have fun with problem-solving in your writing!