Stuck - since October
16 February 2025 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI am still struggling horribly with attempting to rewrite the start of my 'new' de Brencourt story, which was pretty obviously unsatisfactory even to me as soon as I had got it typed up :-(
meibruges read the chapter for me, and her feedback only confirmed my immediate impression that the opening passage simply is not working -- it completely fails to grab the reader, and the story does not come to life until the dialogue starts. This is unfortunate for two reasons: firstly that I normally pride myself on my abilities to write backstory and can't work out what has failed in this case, and secondly because I was actively using this section to drop in certain elements which will be significant later on, but in a manner that feels natural and that ideally the reader will overlook at the time....
Since the fic is actually intended to be about de Brencourt and Roland's own backstory is largely irrelevant, Mei suggested that I simply attempt to omit as much of that as possible -- exploring the effects of this AU scenario from Roland's point of view was fun to write, but it doesn't *need* to be in this particular story. (Sadly it is not likely to feature in any other!) But there are still a lot of facts that need to be set up right at the start, and after a promising dialogue line to kick off the new chapter I find myself simply ending up writing a backstory introduction all over again, only far more laborious and with less well-turned sentences :-(
But then I look back at that 'well-turned' stuff, and it is quite obviously unusable... I don't know why I am finding this so impossible, other than the usual reason that I hate, hate, hate rewrites with a passion, because it is so hard to tailor a fresh passage to fit the confines of a pre-existing hole as opposed to letting it evolve organically. It ought to be easier to write a piece of prose when you have a list in advance of exactly what it needs to say, but it just isn't working... and by trying to make it more immediate and character-focused, I have now introduced the fresh problem of 'talking heads' in completely unspecified surroundings. Again, it ought to be easy to go back and forcibly insert some description, but because of the way I write --with each phrase arising out of an idea in its predecessor-- for some reason it isn't.
The trouble is that I really do want to write up the rest of this story (even though I know full well that *however* well-written it is nobody will want to read it, because there is no fandom in existence!), but there is no point in publishing further chapters if the beginning of this one is an automatic turn-off. And it isn't even the entire chapter; parts of it are excellent (as the curate said to the Bishop), so it ought to be easy to amputate the non-working bits and start with the better parts, but it is proving incredibly difficult, to the degree that I seriously considered abandoning everything I have written in the last couple of weeks (pathetically little in all conscience) and starting again from some different premise. But I did have an inkling of a possible way forward yesterday, so now I just need to see if I can develop that into a coherent chain of phrase. I've still got the 'talking heads' and 'long gaps of backstory in the middle of dialogue' problems...
meibruges read the chapter for me, and her feedback only confirmed my immediate impression that the opening passage simply is not working -- it completely fails to grab the reader, and the story does not come to life until the dialogue starts. This is unfortunate for two reasons: firstly that I normally pride myself on my abilities to write backstory and can't work out what has failed in this case, and secondly because I was actively using this section to drop in certain elements which will be significant later on, but in a manner that feels natural and that ideally the reader will overlook at the time....Since the fic is actually intended to be about de Brencourt and Roland's own backstory is largely irrelevant, Mei suggested that I simply attempt to omit as much of that as possible -- exploring the effects of this AU scenario from Roland's point of view was fun to write, but it doesn't *need* to be in this particular story. (Sadly it is not likely to feature in any other!) But there are still a lot of facts that need to be set up right at the start, and after a promising dialogue line to kick off the new chapter I find myself simply ending up writing a backstory introduction all over again, only far more laborious and with less well-turned sentences :-(
But then I look back at that 'well-turned' stuff, and it is quite obviously unusable... I don't know why I am finding this so impossible, other than the usual reason that I hate, hate, hate rewrites with a passion, because it is so hard to tailor a fresh passage to fit the confines of a pre-existing hole as opposed to letting it evolve organically. It ought to be easier to write a piece of prose when you have a list in advance of exactly what it needs to say, but it just isn't working... and by trying to make it more immediate and character-focused, I have now introduced the fresh problem of 'talking heads' in completely unspecified surroundings. Again, it ought to be easy to go back and forcibly insert some description, but because of the way I write --with each phrase arising out of an idea in its predecessor-- for some reason it isn't.
The trouble is that I really do want to write up the rest of this story (even though I know full well that *however* well-written it is nobody will want to read it, because there is no fandom in existence!), but there is no point in publishing further chapters if the beginning of this one is an automatic turn-off. And it isn't even the entire chapter; parts of it are excellent (as the curate said to the Bishop), so it ought to be easy to amputate the non-working bits and start with the better parts, but it is proving incredibly difficult, to the degree that I seriously considered abandoning everything I have written in the last couple of weeks (pathetically little in all conscience) and starting again from some different premise. But I did have an inkling of a possible way forward yesterday, so now I just need to see if I can develop that into a coherent chain of phrase. I've still got the 'talking heads' and 'long gaps of backstory in the middle of dialogue' problems...
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Date: 2025-02-16 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-19 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-19 09:15 pm (UTC)Oh, you didn't -- I mean, I already knew that there was a problem with it, which is why I sent the chapter to you in the first place. If anything, you pointed out the bits that were actively worth keeping, although I'm not sure I shall be able to retain them all in the current rewrite.
It's just that -- quite apart from everything else, e.g. my major psychological hangups about revision versus fresh composition (as opposed to line-editing, which I'm quite good at) -- the more I abbreviate the material, the more the Necessary Information that I'm trying to slip past the reader seems to stand out as gratuitously obvious. Although to be fair some of that *is* specifically due to the issues of rewriting, in that the ideas are not arising one from another as a natural flow of thought but are defined in advance, and then have by hook or by crook to be somehow inserted...
But I *am* still working on it. I wrote 55 words today --24 during the half-hour walk down to the library, and 21 on the return journey-- and begin to see a possible route through at least to Lady Blaymere's. I don't know how many words in total I have got at this point: it is three pages so far, but three pages absolutely covered in crossings-out.
Nor am I confident that the result will actually do the job, but it will at least be mostly different. I kept trying to insert favourite bits of the old text verbatim, and they kept not really fitting in :-(