Go writing! Write write write! Go get 'em, Astarte!

Which I will be NOT doing all weekend; we're heading south shortly. No computer access and therefore, no work. Feh.

Just had a thought for how to reduce my cast bloat problem and wanted to get some feedback on it. I have to give a lot of background for it to make sense, so bear with me:

My heroine, Lucy, was born in London and raised there until age 9, when she was sent off to live with much wealthier relatives in Essex because she was a sickly child. The story opens in Essex, but quickly moves to Gloucestershire, where most of the action takes place, when Lucy and her aunt go there for a long house party culminating in the marriage of one of Lucy's cousins. While there, Lucy meets the hero, James, and one of her other cousins, Julius, falls in love with James's sister Anna. Both couples get engaged and wish to marry in a hurry, Lucy and James because the irresponsible actions of yet another relative have left Lucy and her multiple younger siblings in dire financial straits, and Julius and Anna because he's a soldier who has to go back to war, and they don't want to wait.

As presently constituted, the couples make a flying visit to London and are married by special license there. My rationale was that Anna wants to visit her favorite dressmaker and say farewell to some London-based friends before leaving England for who knows how many years, and that Lucy and James can get formal consent from her parents and have them present at her marriage. Which is all well and good, but I've got this little problem with the story going long and cast bloat, and it feels weird having to flesh out Lucy's parents and siblings this late in the story when they've been offstage all along before. Of course they're important people to Lucy herself, but I'm not sure they're important to the story.

So I'm thinking of taking the whole London episode out and having the couples get married in Gloucestershire. It streamlines things, but I want to keep it by special license (as opposed to the three-week delay for the standard procedure), and I'm not sure James and Lucy have a good enough reason to do so anymore--their original motive was a combination of wanting her parents there and Anna wanting to see her brother married before she had to leave England. So now I'm only left with the second half of it. Also, I'm afraid Lucy will seem cold toward her parents if they don't come up at all, though I could always make brief mention of it in the epilogue--say they visited London, and mentione some of the things James does to make life better for her family, but leave it as a summary rather than a scene.

Anyway, I'm rambling here, but how does that sound?

So, I just subscribed here. Hi peeps!

I too am working on some original writing, as well as the sporadic, occasional fic, and figured it was time I plugged into that section of the hivemind as well.

So, do we just discuss works and the process here, or do we also occasionally post actual writings to beta and workshop?

Do it, Susan. Put in the scenes that are essential to get Susan from Point A to Point B. Leave out the rest. *g*

And putting in an entire sequence just to show that Lucy's not cold to her parents is wasteful. You can have her drop casual comments about buying a new fantod for Papa's birthday and Mama's latest letter and achieve the same effect.

Susan, that makes sense to me.

Sean, lurk. We do some and some.

I'm going to do it. It'll take significant restructuring, so I'm not worrying about it for the current version I'm getting ready to send off to deb's agent friend. But my current project, entering all the longhand bits I've been writing over the past month into the manuscript, is going much better since I skipped various bad London scenes that I know will be completely cut, rather than just reworked, and moved on.

Last night, I dreamt a woman was following me round saying, "a novel is only five hundred drabbles". At the time, I was a bit annoyed (don't remember why) but now, awake, I'm wondering about it. I mean, numerically it checks out (100 x 500 = 50K) which is odd, because my subconcious isn't reknowned for it's mathematical ability; but does it work as a method for writing? Previously, on setting out to write a novel, I've started with a group of characters and some idea of the plot, and let them go, the way I'd approach a fanfic project. On the rare occassions I finish such a thing, it's nowhere near novel length.

If I set out to write a novel all in drabbles, though, I'd still have to set up some characters and a plot; but I could write the sections of the plot in almost any order, and it would be easy to slip them together into order, because they'd be neat blocks of 100 words. It would make it easy to feel sure that I hadn't made it to length by adding in extraneous words; on the other hand, I'd have to find 500 seperate 'points' to make. Any thoughts?

I've never used the drabble technique, but if nothing else, your subconscious has a point that if you faithfully wrote 100 words a night, you'd have a novel-length manuscript in less than two years.

I think a purely successful drabble, which stands alone has a more emphatic structure than a drabble which would be a building block in a chapter or novel -- a standalone has to introduce characters, setting, dramatic tension and resolution, whereas a structural drabble has to successfully link up with the dramatic tension and resolution of the previous drabble, and provide hooks that set up the successive drabble (unless the dividing line is going to be a scene or chapter break, in which case you want to push some plot resolution while leaving strong setup to cause the reader to be really anxious to start reading the next section ASAP. A cliffhanger doesn't have to be imminent bodily peril....)

A writing teacher once told me that not only does every paragraph have its own mini-plot (setup, rising action, climax, denouement), each sentence has an action arc as well, whether it's description or dialogue. Not all parts of the "plot" are necessarily overt, because the reader can fill in the blanks with previously supplied information, and will actually enjoy doing so. (This is how you seduce a reader into being "involved" and invoke a page-turner.) The successively bigger-yet-nested sets of sentence-plots, paragraph-plots, scene-plots and chapter-plots make the larger work cohesive and flowing.

You could do a lot worse than approaching 'every hundred words' of your longer stories as drabbles, and subjecting them to the same level of intensive scrutiny and manicuring, judging every word and phrase as to its value to the micro-plot of the immediate dramatic unit, plus its utility to the macro-plot. It's a lot to juggle... but that's why writing is one of the fine arts, and why you can practice it for the rest of your life and still enjoy it.

I've got lots of page ones, but that doesn't count.