A Cautionary Tale

[swan_tower]

If it should ever happen to any of you that you come up with an idea for a novel when you're seventeen, write the novel when you're eighteen, pull something of a strange point of view trick in it, shop it around for a while, thoroughly rewrite it when you're twenty-one but leave the strange point of view trick in, shop it around some more, sell a different novel and its sequel, come back to the aforementioned novel with its strange point of view trick, and realize that the only way to make the strange point of view trick work is to give one of the characters more point of view scenes earlier in the novel, be warned: this is what you'll end up with on your library floor.

I'm hoping that having the entire bloody novel laid out, chapter by chapter and scene by scene, in visual format, will help me figure out where I can arrange for the necessary scenes. Because there's graven in stone, and then there's what this novel is in my head.

And don't even get me started on the need for a new title.

Comments

[gollumgollum.livejournal.com]

What...that's all? (;

(And hey wait...you wrote *another* book?!1)

[sarcastibich.livejournal.com]

You're funny. Good luck with figuring it out.

I still haven't read "Doppleganger." I own it, but other books were ahead of it in the queue. However, I'm almost done with those books, so I should be able to pick it up and read it soon. I'm looking forward to it, having heard good things from others who have read it.

[ninja-turbo.livejournal.com]

Your level of amazing devotion-bordering-on-insanity to your work is inspiring, yo.

Good luck. What's on the slate to be written this year for Summer Novel Cult?

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

:) It looks like you are starting a quilt.

Hmmm..... maybe you have started a new trend: Novel Quilts.

writer...insanity

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

...you do know this picture is a giggler, right?

I saw it and immediately starter chuckling - is it any wonder they used to routinely stick writers in funny farms for being...weird?

[elizaeffect.livejournal.com]

Oh, I expect to be there quite soon. It is a silly place. >.>

(I have this half-a-novel I wrote somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18. One of my possible goals for this summer is to tear the previous drafts into tiny bits and rewrite the entire damn thing.)

[eclectician.livejournal.com]

groovy. one thing we learn about in design skool is actually various tricks for visualising the structure and action of a play - making a complex narrative more easily comprehensible, and enabling yourself to get deeper into it, by laying various sorts of visual organisation over it.

one interesting side effect is that because coming up with these visual layouts is actually fairly slow work, you can almost hypnotise yourself into creativity.