Category Archives: Uncategorized

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It’s not working

The last couple of days, I’ve been plugging away at a chapter near the end of my current story. (No I’m not nearly that far yet, but I’m trying to give myself a road map so I stay on track and make sure I’m laying the foundation for the end I want.) After burning a couple of hours on it last night, I reached the conclusion it’s not working. The dialogue feels forced, it’s hard as hell to write and I can’t seem to transition from one part of the action to the next. Even though it’s not narrator heavy, it may as well be. In the same way you end up with problems when there aren’t enough characters to drive the action and dialogue, too many characters can result in having too much information come all at once. I should call the problem by it by it’s real name The dreaded information dump (sometimes these are necessary and, if done well, good).

Once again, I think back to my work-shopping days and how I was frequently told that I had an information dump problem, and I’m dead certain I told people that as well. It’s an excellent thing to help someone find, but saying “you have an information dump here” isn’t particularly helpful. From the reader’s perspective it’s an easy thing to identify. I feel like it can be harder to see from this side of the page. Even harder yet is finding a way to eliminate the problem, or find a way for it to work. In the situation I’m working through now, the solution is to simply break up the conversation. I’m going to remove a character or two from the problematic scene, and have them go away before bringing in the characters I had to remove. In this way, the dialogue will be split up according to the relevant character instead of trying to work it in naturally, after the fashion of a real conversation with a bunch of people.

 

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Start at the beginning

Such great advice. Not that anyone actually follows it. I’m certain I didn’t anyhow. The current fantasy project I’m working on started out as a single hand-written page concept for a science fiction story, my notes put it sometime in 2004. Although I had a character and some very basic ideas about his circumstances, I didn’t have a beginning. So, I went looking for one. The circumstances for my character were somewhat fantastical and so the history became fantastical, which eventually led me to a setting in which you would expect a high fantasy to occur. This process also introduced other characters and conflicts, which eventually eclipsed the original concept as the more interesting story. Even then, I still didn’t have a beginning. In the vain hope of a beginning coming to me, I spent years creating maps and languages, people and history. After that, I still didn’t have a beginning, so I started writing-up the back-stories of characters I’d developed for this world. Finally, in desperation, I did a global search and replace of a name in one of these back-stories just to see what might happen, and suddenly I had my beginning. The next few chapters came easily over the course of a couple of weeks. I felt really good about them too. Then, I asked several people to read over the work. Needless to say, the beginning, and the bulk of the subsequent chapters, only vaguely resemble what I started with, but the core of my story remains, and I’m still making progress.