Hello, writers. Six years ago today I posted a diary suggesting that if anyone on dkos had been thinking of writing a book, there was no time like New Year’s Day to start. The response sort of surprised me… it turned out a lot of people had been thinking of writing a book. And thus was Write On! born.
Currently it’s being written by a roster of brilliant hosts. (I don’t have regular internet access and won’t for the next three months at least.) If you’d like to sign up to do a Write On! diary, please respond to my comment below.
Since 1/1/09 a lot of stuff has gotten written around here… a lot of starts, a lot of finishes, a lot of rewriting, and some publication. It all counts and it’s all good.
Right now I’ve got a story spread out on the kitchen table. Index cards, bubble maps, the works. The stuff on the table is the last few chapters of the second draft of my next book after Jinx’s Fire. At the moment I’m making a series of bubble maps entitled Guns on the Wall. There are a lot of these.
There’s been a mysterious voice, for example, commenting on the protagonist’s actions all through the manuscript. I don’t want to get rid of the voice, because it’s got appeal. But I'm not quite sure who it belongs to. Readers will expect to find out who it is, though, and they’ll expect the answer to be 1. readily understandable and 2. good.
And there’s a character who’s been set up to die from the beginning. I have to kill her off convincingly. That’s going to take a lot of space; she deserves a decent death scene. If I can’t make one, I’ll have to go back and remove all suggestions that she’s being set up to die.
All in all, there are about a dozen guns, and about 10,000 words total in which to fire them off. That’s not enough, so some of those guns are going to have to be disarmed. On the index card for one, I’ve written “Only do this scene if you can do it without reaching.”
By reaching I mean departing from what I hope will eventually be the cohesive whole of the novel. If the writer reaches for something, it doesn’t seem to fit in the story. It feels tacked on. My first editor would say it wasn’t “organic”.
Most of my guns tend to be story questions. Who is…? Why does…? How can the protagonist manage to…? Story questions will keep a reader reading, as long as they’re interesting enough and are answered. (Some story questions should be answered fairly soon after they’re asked, or readers will just get frustrated.)
Another kind of gun, though, is the Situation Designed to Explode. If we learn the protagonist is terrified of red-headed women, then we expect a red-headed woman to show up. If we’re shown that the railroad bridge over Scary Elk Gulch has a weak stanchion (is that the right word?) then we assume we’re supposed to worry about that for a reason. If the characters live in a society where it’s illegal to
So tonight’s challenge is, of course….
Hang a gun on the wall.
It can be a Story Question, a Situation Designed to Explode, or some other kind of gun.
The setting is that storied tavern, The Startled Duck. In it are a Callow Youth, his/her Stout Companion, and, of course, the gun you’re about to hang on the wall.
Try to limit yourself to 150 words.
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