Plot Point Fifteen
22 November 2019 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThis is not working.
I've been making very heavy weather of the two Raoul-viewpoint chapters, and I'm not sure how much of it is a basic viewpoint issue and how much is generic over-complication, but I wasn't terribly happy with the first four thousand laborious words and I was less happy with the three or four days' paragraph by paragraph work I've done on the new chapter. I was thinking of restarting that bit for other reasons, but going back and looking at my original notes just shows how far I've strayed from my Raoul PoV-concept -- I simply can't write the next bit now because it won't fit.
The whole thing just feels much too slow and much too complicated. I think the pacing is wrong -- all the extra bits I've inserted as an attempt to patch perceived plot holes (Christine being tied down dealing with the aftermath of Erik's attack on Stefan the guide, Erik seizing upon Raoul's injured arm) are taking up far too much time both in terms of narrative space and actual elapsed minutes in the scene.
I strongly suspect I need to rewrite this entire section, which is a hideous prospect (quite apart from representing weeks of work), because rewriting once you've got wrong ideas into your head is infinitely harder than writing onto a blank page of infinite possibility... But I strongly suspect that what I've got simply isn't fixable, because I think it's the attempts at fixing which have been causing the essential problem.
Maybe what I need to do for a start is at least print out my original summary (which still has its urgent pulse, even if it doesn't quite work when you look at it too closely) so that I can refer to that when I'm actually writing -- I thought trying to do it from memory would keep things fresher, but evidently not :-(
I've been making very heavy weather of the two Raoul-viewpoint chapters, and I'm not sure how much of it is a basic viewpoint issue and how much is generic over-complication, but I wasn't terribly happy with the first four thousand laborious words and I was less happy with the three or four days' paragraph by paragraph work I've done on the new chapter. I was thinking of restarting that bit for other reasons, but going back and looking at my original notes just shows how far I've strayed from my Raoul PoV-concept -- I simply can't write the next bit now because it won't fit.
The whole thing just feels much too slow and much too complicated. I think the pacing is wrong -- all the extra bits I've inserted as an attempt to patch perceived plot holes (Christine being tied down dealing with the aftermath of Erik's attack on Stefan the guide, Erik seizing upon Raoul's injured arm) are taking up far too much time both in terms of narrative space and actual elapsed minutes in the scene.
I strongly suspect I need to rewrite this entire section, which is a hideous prospect (quite apart from representing weeks of work), because rewriting once you've got wrong ideas into your head is infinitely harder than writing onto a blank page of infinite possibility... But I strongly suspect that what I've got simply isn't fixable, because I think it's the attempts at fixing which have been causing the essential problem.
Maybe what I need to do for a start is at least print out my original summary (which still has its urgent pulse, even if it doesn't quite work when you look at it too closely) so that I can refer to that when I'm actually writing -- I thought trying to do it from memory would keep things fresher, but evidently not :-(
