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Just found this thread! Great that you're enjoying NaNoWriMo - wanted to let you know that the newer chapters are significantly improved on the first rewrite attempts. Keep it up!
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Nov 29, 2020 22:46
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Simply Simon posted:I do have a specific question which maybe someone who's following this could help with. When I first wrote the novel, my favorite chapters to write apart from dumb action were the ones where the Golem just spent some time thinking about himself, trying to evaluate his place in the world and his own self-image. I think what would help you is to think about the purpose of all this introspection and how it is going to advance the golem's character arc. Brandon Sanderson may or may not be your cup of tea but he does a good job of covering the craft of writing. And in his lectures, he does address introspection specifically, see Sanderson’s 2020 BYU Lecture 10: https://youtu.be/fJfE-HMfSkk?t=1135 and https://youtu.be/fJfE-HMfSkk?t=2079 You can have entire stories that take place inside someone's head. But if you're going to do that, there needs to be a point to it. A realization. An insight. A decision. A change. You've tried to do this in the last excerpt which makes it better than some of your previous attempts. But there's still quite a bit of "wow more questions and I've still got no real idea" so as a reader, I feel like I read a whole bunch of words for nothing. If the questions are important, think about breaking it up and sprinkling them throughout sections where you've got action happening. There's no rule saying that introspection can only happen when the golem is standing around doing nothing. It'd be more interesting if we saw the introspection happening as a direct response to other things that are going on. This is coming from a perspective where I want to find out what's going to happen in the story. The introspection bits feel like a gigantic pause in the forward momentum. Sometimes that's needed when you've had a really fast paced sequence but usually those moments of reflection do double duty as well. The other thing you can do is reverse engineer things. See if you can find long sections of introspection that are really effective, then take a look at what they have in common.
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Dec 20, 2020 01:58
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Simply Simon posted:Brandon Sanderson is, in fact, my cup of tea  Go back and take a look at some of the introspection he does in Mistborn, especially Vin's arc. I would also recommend Stormlight Archive though be warned it's a LOT of reading, however there's a lot of introspection chapters done really well. Simply Simon posted:I've watched the video (thanks a lot for the links), and agree that with a better structure, interspersed with "development goal has been reached" sentences, it will be much more readable. If you enjoyed it, I highly recommend watching all of the lecture videos. They are so good and I've found the frameworks he goes through very helpful for my own writing. Simply Simon posted:In order to not forget, I've put a structure note into that chapter. I've decided that I'll keep on writing the draft instead of editing now, because that will bog me down. Keep the momentum going, that's the important part!! Worry about the rest later, when you've roughed out what the story IS.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:51
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