So I faced down the rampaging plot monkeys and spent two whole days rearranging the scenes in the third book so that they bear even less resemblance to chronology but hopefully make more sense thematically. Or storyishly anyway.
There should be a better word for that. Actually, there probably is and my brain just doesn’t want to play with me. That’s what happens when you spend forty eight hours bullying it.
It’s quite difficult at the best of times to hold a pattern for a whole book in your head and figure out how it works. It’s like doing math but with words. And this book is not the most straightforward in terms of plot structure. So I was sitting there, trying to figure out what I’m doing, thinking, I need a large blank sheet of paper and a pen. And then being frustrated because my computer wasn’t a large blank piece of paper and a pen. Then Rick pointed out to me that I actually owned a number of pens and could draw on the walls if nothing else came to hand…
After a (completely necessary) pen choosing, drawing paper locating and random doodling interlude I decided to give the plot strands acronyms so I could make notes about them quickly (and to simplify the visual representation of the plot). So the third book can now be summarised as: PEW, WTD, BB, RA, DAR and WOTE.*
Only not in that order of course. It’s more like WTD – PEW – PEW – PEW – WTD – BB – RA – WOTE… and so on. (And no, there are no cool laser guns in this book despite the pew, pew, pew. And D does not stand for a swear word of any kind. Nor does WTD stand for What The Dragon. Although, to be honest, that wouldn’t be an entirely inappropriate interpretation of that plot strand).
And once I had it laid out like that I was suddenly not surprised that it’s been driving me crazy. Six plot threads in four time frames and more locations than I can even figure out how to count. (I am insane and so is this book. So we’re just going to kill ourselves now. Goodbye.)
* And incidentally figured out the acronyms for the working titles of the first three books are SETHD, TRTH and RON. Ron. Seriously? I named my book Ron?
Kandace Mavrick
Paul McLaughlan
kdoherty89
22/08/2011
Ha! This is a pretty funny post. I liked the artwork and I understand completely how it feels after a long day of writing. Sometimes it’s just so hard to get started!
Kandace Mavrick
22/08/2011
The danger is getting distracted by the planning and using different coloured pens and sketching the characters and drawing maps and… Not that I do any of that, of course. I’m a perfectly sensible writer who totally just sits down and writes like a responsible — yeah, I can’t even SAY that with a straight face.
kdoherty89
23/08/2011
Oh, pfft, there’s no danger in that! I love sketching things out, it helps visualize the scene, which then helps me (personally) write about it. Drawing the characters is the most fun for me, plus I can use it as a reference guide if I forget some detail about their looks.
Kandace Mavrick
23/08/2011
Mm, I like having character sketches as reference to look at although I actually try not to draw locations unless I’ve already described them in the text, otherwise when I come to do it I start describing in architectural terms and become horribly boring and have to delete everything.
I didn’t really get the urge to draw with this story until I started the third book, I think because at that point I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t contradicting myself and that I was keeping track of who the characters started out as and who they were turning into… although how I can tell that from looking at sketches I don’t actually know… 😛
Also it turns out I can’t draw trolls to save my life. Which I’m a bit disappointed about. But cute and cartoonish is just not the feeling I want them to project so I guess I’ll have to keep my pictures of them in my head for now.
Claire
22/08/2011
Such a shame you found paper.
Jus’ sayin’
Kandace Mavrick
22/08/2011
I think Rick’s glad I did. Also, while my character sketches may have enlivened the walls, if I’d actually used them to map out the story I wouldn’t want to let anyone in the house in case of spoilers 🙂
hotshot bald cop
30/08/2011
Thank you for a great post.
hotshot bald cop
03/09/2011
Interesting views regarding that!