Structure and Pacing

[khiemtran]

No writing time this week, but I have had a chance to reflect on the structure of the story-at-hand.

As I see it, there are two loosely-related problems at the moment. The first is that the story is dangerously complex. Not that complexity is a bad thing in itself, but in this case I'm doing a huge amount of work just to explain the particular crises the characters face - which then leads to deflation when the characters turn out to overcome the problem anyway. I need to make the story easier to follow and the characters' goals and hindrances more intuitive. Choosing different viewpoints might help here, because the current set of viewpoint characters just don't have a good enough view of the big picture to understand what's going on.

The second is that rather than building steadily, the crises tend to appear out of nowhere, then vanish, then appear again. I think I can pinpoint the place where it all goes wrong - there's one spot where things change unexpectedly for the better right when they should be getting worse. This then leads to a correction where things get suddenly worse again, but it's difficult to reconcile the characters emotions and motivations through the different sections. I could get away with it if I could have things going suspiciously well until the correction happens, or if I wanted to show my characters as even more naive than they already are. The simplest solution seems to be to change the structure to keep the crises coming. The unexpected reversal only lasts long enough to build up a glimmer of hope before the next real crisis is revealed. This would work, but I may have to lose some of my favourite comic scenes based around the naivety of the characters. I'm going to have to do a bit more thinking here about which option to take.

Comments

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I added viewpoint characters for some of the same reasons. Plus, it helped me build suspense by showing the antagonists out of earshot from the protag and friends. That really got me over a hump in the writing.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, bringing some of the antagonists on-stage should help (at the very least it should cut down on the number of eavesdropping scenes). I'm also looking at bringing more of the crises on-stage as well. I.e. Instead of the characters hearing of something that might happen in the future, they get to experience it instead first hand.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, the deadly eavesdropping scenes. :) That's when I realized I had to add a pov character. I had poor Tomas listening in to conversations taking place in an office and had to make sure the office wasn't soundproofed and that voices could carry, etc. And then the whole scene was what he was overhearing and well, it just made more sense to give one of the guys he was eavesdropping on a pov of his own.

It's things like that that got me to realize that I really can't plan too much ahead of the actual writing, especially not how many povs I need.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Show, don't tell ;-)

Eavesdropping is sometimes necessary, but if it happens too often or too conveniently, I find it rather off-putting. Characters being surprised has much more style and keeps my interest better.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The compexity this is one the reader can deal with more easily when there is a clear line running through the story. I'm currently reading a book that's split into four strands, and while they're slowly beginning to come together, I've read half a book already - if I'd had other books to read, or if the writing wasn't so wonderful, I'd well have put it down. (John Courtenay Grimwood, Stamping Butterflies). Equally, with regard to the Quadrology, I found that it flowed better when I cut out some of the complexity and concentrated on the main storyline. There were a lot of minor issues and subplots; and most of them went out because they distracted from the main story.

As for the naivity - is there a justification why they _remain_ naive? I would expect them to change somewhat.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

In this case, the naivety is only plausible if it's very hard to shake. There's room for a little growth, but if there's too much, it raises the question of what the character was still doing naive at the start of the story.

The other factor with the complexity is that the two main characters both have "the system" as the antagonist. For one character, it's the society at large which treats him as a non-person, for the other it's the celestial bureaucracy that insists on punishing him for his well-intentioned misdeeds. On the next go-around, I'm going to try choosing specific enemies who can act as embodiments of those systems.