Niggle Update, Part 1
Aug. 15th, 2006 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranProgress on the niggles has been good so far. I've deleted a few scenes and reordered some others, and I've reduced the niggle count by about half. It's interesting how much better some of the scenes work in their new ordering. I do have something of a tendency to repeat scenes as I write - often, apparently unconsciously, coming up with a better stab at the same idea the second time around. The good thing about the reordering is that I can now just pick and choose the best ones rather than leaving everything in there.
Chief among the remaining niggles is the viewpoint character's home village, which does not get razed by mercenaries at this time. Unfortunately, while this is good news for said character, it does leave a bit of work to come up a good reason why he doesn't just turn around and go back there. I've changed some of the early events so the character gets swept further away from home earlier on, and I've pushed the village itself further from the character's home. I'm not sure if this works yet. It might require more drastic measures.
The other big remaining niggle is to do with tone - balancing the drama and the humour, which does involve some modern references. Thta's going to be a tricky act to get right. At the moment, I'm going with introducing them both right at the start, at the risk of undermining some of the drama, to avoid too much of a crunch when the humour does kick in. The original plan was to alternate between the two, but it didn't really work in the first draft. A fallback strategy will be to pare the humour right back to see if it works as straight adventure with some light comic relief.
Chief among the remaining niggles is the viewpoint character's home village, which does not get razed by mercenaries at this time. Unfortunately, while this is good news for said character, it does leave a bit of work to come up a good reason why he doesn't just turn around and go back there. I've changed some of the early events so the character gets swept further away from home earlier on, and I've pushed the village itself further from the character's home. I'm not sure if this works yet. It might require more drastic measures.
The other big remaining niggle is to do with tone - balancing the drama and the humour, which does involve some modern references. Thta's going to be a tricky act to get right. At the moment, I'm going with introducing them both right at the start, at the risk of undermining some of the drama, to avoid too much of a crunch when the humour does kick in. The original plan was to alternate between the two, but it didn't really work in the first draft. A fallback strategy will be to pare the humour right back to see if it works as straight adventure with some light comic relief.
