Hello, writers. For those who write for publication or are interested in doing so, this article by fantasy author Ian Irvine contains tons of useful info, including the oft-elusive Actual Numbers. (Note that unless stated otherwise, he's probably talking about Australian dollars.) Recommended reading.
(Only not right this second, because it's long.)
In other news, NaNoWriMo is upon us again. You know the drill: Write 50,000 words during the month of November. Many here have attempted it in the past, and many have won through.
It works out to 1667 words a day, or 1724 a day if you take Thanksgiving off.
Most WOers who have done NaNoWriMo in the past haven't bothered to register at the website... but we do keep a running wordcount tally on WO for those who find that at all motivating.
I'm not going to participate this year because I don't have anything right now that's in the stage of development where a flat-out write-a-thon would do it much good. I drafted Jinx during NaNoWriMo 2009, which was the only year I did it. This was preceded by several months of planning-- or doodling, anyway-- and followed by several months of rewriting. (Not counting the additional rewriting after it sold, of course.)
Takeaway: You can learn a whole lot about your process by doing NaNoWriMo.
Moving on.
Tonight's topic is something I've only recently noticed, which is the need to evoke in the reader the same feelings that the protagonist is having at a particular moment.
(Or whoever is the point-of-view character in the scene. Usually it's the protagonist.)
I realized as I was re-re-revising Jinx 3 the other day that I was cutting some jokes, something I would once have done only over my own dead body. “Why am I doing this?” I asked.
“Because you don't want the reader to laugh here. This is supposed to be, with any luck, a moving scene,” I answered.
There were things I wanted the reader to feel along with the protagonist in those scenes: fear, a sense of injustice, joy.
This made me think of two books I had recently read. One was a history book about a tragic event, written in a cheery, tongue-in-cheek fashion. The other was a funny children's adventure story, in which it was impossible to ever take the terrible dangers our intrepid heroes faced seriously, because it appeared that the writer didn't.
You don't want to hobble yourself like this. Your success in telling a story relies on the reader's buying in to what you're, er, selling. You don't want to offer him/her an opportunity to say “Oh, well, the goblins aren't that scary/the war wasn't that bad/the Least Grebe wasn't really going to hurt them”.
Disengaged readers are the last thing you want.
By contrast, in The Book Thief by Mark Zusak, which you should read, the narrator at one point mentions that there's not going to be any humor because it's not appropriate to the subject matter. (The author's previous books were humorous.)
The point I'm trying to make here is not “don't be funny” but “make sure your voice matches the mood, whatever the mood is”.
It's quite likely you do this already. But anyway, please take a crack at it in tonight's challenge.
Rewrite the passage below (and by “rewrite” I mean “change as much as you like”). Imbue it with a sense of one of the following:
fear
nostalgia
(in)justice
the ridiculous
[something else]
The door opened. I couldn't see who opened it. It was dark inside. I went in.
“Hello?” I called. “Anybody home?”
No answer.
I tried to strike a match, but it broke. I didn't have another. Anyway, I knew where the stairs were. So I walked to them, and went up.
As I climbed, I heard something move behind me.
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