The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2007-03-21 12:34 am
thewhitelily) wrote2007-03-21 12:34 am
Entry tags:
- futureproof,
- nano,
- nano06,
- tldr,
- writing
The Top Ten Reasons My NaNovel Sucks
The approach of April Fools (another words-in-a-month challenge) has brought me to the rational consideration of my NaNovel, the possibilities of finishing it, and the problems to be overcome if said goal is to be achieved.
So, I present to you: The Top Ten Reasons My NaNovel Sucks
10: There’s remarkably few Sci-Fi-y flourishes. There’s several that are central to the plot, but not nearly enough worldbuilding stuff just… around. I don’t really consider that a flaw, because (like foreshadowing) that’s a part of the editing process, but still.
9: It’s in first person, but really should be in third, which is an editing nightmare to change.
8: My terrorists/freedom fighters flip-flop wildly between being entirely flippant about the whole thing and then way past the point of melodrama. As does my protagonist, now I think about it.
7: I entirely forgot about my Noble Companion and, last the reader hears of him, he’s unconscious in a building under evacuation.
6: I have no antagonist to speak of – just a few isolated petty or backstabbing sadists, the presence of which really doesn’t justify the severity of the protagonist’s actions. I finally managed an antagonist about three quarters of the way through, who does everything short of moustache-twirling in the efforts to get him to be evil enough to bother doing away with.
5: I’ve somehow managed to write a novel with absolutely no dramatic tension, despite the fact that every revelation comes as a complete surprise to the protagonist. How? Well… the revelations come so far out of left field that he’s not expecting anything to be tense about beforehand. And since he’s not actually trying to, you know, achieve anything except satisfy his curiosity…
4: Neither is there any sexual tension, because it turned out my protagonist was too hung up on his ex to fall for the femme fatale. Who also didn’t actually turn out to be all that fatale. Best laid plans, eh?
3: Even the romantic tension, which is intended to be exceedingly subtle, only shows up in three very short scenes with an almost entirely off-screen character.
2: If I could think of another sort of tension, it probably wouldn’t have that either.
1: My protagonist is seriously the most boring person alive. Or, you know, written. Which was kind of intentional, and what was I thinking?
So here’s my decision: I am officially abandoning my NaNovel. Sad, but not entirely unexpected – and I don’t consider it a waste in the least. What an experience of world building and characterisation and plot development and my own capacity to just write, and… wow.
We all had to write the fics we now cringe at to gain the skills to write the fic that’s our latest baby. I had to write Harry Potter and the Promise Ring before I had the skills to write His Son’s Father, and I definitely had to write His Son’s Father before I had anything like the skills to write The Mother of Invention or this crossover I’ve been promising everyone for a year. I’ve looked back on Promise Ring with a wince for years – and I’m just now reached the point where I’m starting to do the same with His Son’s Father. I needed to make the mistakes I’ve made to learn how to make them – to learn how to avoid making them.
Return to Sender was not exactly a misstep along the way, merely my first attempt to fly without the wires that have been holding me up all along. Of course it was filled with mistakes – how could it not be?
I could never have even started in on writing without the support of fanfiction – I simply couldn’t. Fanfiction gave me the framework to start, the framework of characters and a fantasy world that let me reach for the stars and develop a plot and suspense and action and adventure and romance and… to write what was in my heart and my head, bursting to come out, without having to worry about what I’ve always thought of as the hard bit: coming up the framework for the idea. With fanfiction, the framework is just there, and all I need to do is twist a detail or explore some unique possibility.
So what are the lessons I’ve learned from NaNoWriMo? Apart from the simple fact that wow, I really can get it out when I try, they’re too many and too nebulous to put into words. But I think the most important lessons I’ve learned are (not unexpectedly) about original characterisation.
Lesson 1: Protagonist / Point of View Character
My favourite characters in any story are always the normal ones, swept up in events beyond their control. There’s at least one character like that in pretty much every book or movie I’ve loved. They’re also particularly useful characters to have, because they allow easy exposition – the reader sees their expanding world through their eyes, pulling them into the wonder or terror of their new experiences.
I knew all this, so this is where I started with my NaNovel – I had a concept, and I gave the story a main character who was… incredibly normal and moderately content with his place in the strange world I’d created. He had everything he’d cared about stripped away by the ubiquitous evil organisation, and he struck back against the organisation and triumphed.
But all these normal characters had one other thing in common: an agenda. There was one thing they wanted more than life itself, even if they didn’t realise it until the moment of choice came, they took little steps towards it with every breath they took. I knew this component of a protagonist, too, but somehow… somehow, my protagonist ended up without an agenda. Sure, Gary has things taken away from him through the course of the story by the Evil Doers, things that rock his world and make him rethink his perceptions. But he’s indecisive to a painful extent. This was intentional, and turned out to be a strength in the end, but it meant that there was nothing he really felt all that strongly about – and when he saw things wrong with the world, he didn’t really think he could do anything about it or decide to do something about it until the opportunity was thrust upon him. He ended up doing the things he did simply because he had nothing better to do with his time, rather than because it was the deepest desire of his heart to achieve what was on the other side.
Now I’ve pinpointed the exact problem, it should be straightforward to fix, really – give him a bit of a temper, a bit of impulsive insatiable curiosity, and a much healthier dose of cowardice to overcome… or even just acknowledge that this is the case and bring the story to him rather than dragging him around to meet it. Changing his personality would make him less of a foil for his best friend, but would make things easier with the femme fatale as well as introduce a much-needed aspect of tension into his relationship with his love interest. Bringing the story to him would work, but requires a great deal more in the way of cleverness on my part to disguise the coincidences.
Neither is particularly impossible, but nor is either particularly easy.
Lesson 2: Antagonist
This is probably the single biggest problem with my NaNovel. My protagonist could sit in front of the television all day eating Cheezels if I had someone for the reader to hate – to really, really hate. Someone who, in attempting to make the protagonist’s life miserable beyond measure, sows the seeds of his own destruction. Someone in whose end the reader can rejoice, rather than just going “well, that was stupid of him”.
Sure, I’ve got a ubiquitous organisation that does Bad Things – bad enough that when I finally worked out how to destroy them on their own terms I started dancing around yelling “Take that!” But there’s no real Evil, justified or otherwise – and all my attempts to bring it in ended up with melodramatic unsupported and random Evilness or waxing lyrical on how it was a nice idea that just doesn’t work with corrupt and imperfect human beings carrying it out.
I think it would have actually worked out if I’d spent some more time in my antagonists pockets – if I’d actually developed of any kind of personal antagonist short of about a week before finishing and been able to give him a believable reason for acting the way he/his company was… I knew I was in trouble without a decent antagonist, I really did know it - I just had unwarranted faith I'd be able to sort him out and weave him in later, when he came to me.
Urgh. Good antagonists: the bane of any writer’s life.
Lesson 3: Supporting Cast
There wasn’t quite so much wrong with my supporting isn’t so much missing as underdeveloped. I mean, I’ve got some fantastic potential supporting characters – but that’s all they are. Potential. I never leave the viewpoint of my main character, and he simply doesn’t spend enough time with any of them to let them develop a rapport with the reader. When they’re there, they’re too busy spitting out vast swathes of expository dialogue to make any kind of positive impression. The main problem, though, was that I was having enough trouble dragging the main character around after me without any particular motivation to weave in more than a couple of supporting characters with any particular depth.
Actually, there isn’t really all that much to Lesson 3 that couldn’t have been merged into Lesson 2, but hey – with me, two’s just never enough.
The thing is: I could fix all this. I know where I went wrong, and I could fix it all – I could write another fifty thousand words from different viewpoints with their own agendas and subplots, I could cut or rewrite huge swathes of what I’ve written, I could fill out the world to be beautiful and consistent and absorbing and packed with characters who each follow their own path and story, I could give my main character an agenda and a swift kick up the rear end, and I could definitely create tension of some sort from each scene to disconnected scene…
I could also go back and fix some of the worst exposition in His Son’s Father, do a thorough rewrite of the first chapters of The Promise Ring, spend the rest of my life finishing off my AF/HP crossover, and never move forward with my writing career.
Or, I could say “lesson learned” and move on. I could start another story that’s got a main character who’s built around his agenda rather than having it spliced in later, that’s in my chosen genre of fantasy rather than Sci-Fi, where my supporting cast don’t lose their own agendas and storylines in my fight to make my main character behave – and most of all, that has a real antagonist right from the first chapter.
Funnily enough, I’ve got a plot – and a world – in my head, that sounds remarkably like that. Not because I’ve twisted it to fit my new realisations, but when I came back for a look at it I was surprised at how many it fit. It’s been resident in my upper brain space for about three years, but I’ve never written more than a few snatches from it. Theoretically, it’s a prequel to the original story that’s been in my head for about five years – it started out as deep background for that and grew from there into a wonderful deep and complex quest. I’m starting to dream it, I’m starting to daydream it, I’m starting to have proper flashes of it. This is what I must write.
April is approaching fast. I’ll planning to have another attempt at April Fools, only this time I’ll do it because I know I can: and why aim for only fifteen thousand when I know I can write fifty thousand? All I need to do is get my Remix and my Toolbelt article out of the way in the meantime. Easy. *cough*
In other news, since I am officially abandoning my NaNovel, I’m coming good on my promise. Anyone interested in reading 50,000 words of abysmal, inconsistent, entirely unforeshadowed and utterly unpolished first draft, by an author who’s never written a new world or a set of original characters in her life is welcome to ask me for a copy of the document. I refuse to allow myself be ashamed to let people see it the vapid combination of blandness and melodrama that characterises all my first drafts – this is what NaNoWriMo is about, after all: exuberant imperfection, quantity not quality, making mistakes… so that next time around, I can hopefully give it a better go at avoiding them.
With that glowing review of Return to Sender out of the way, anyone who still wants a copy is welcome to let me know. :)
So, I present to you: The Top Ten Reasons My NaNovel Sucks
10: There’s remarkably few Sci-Fi-y flourishes. There’s several that are central to the plot, but not nearly enough worldbuilding stuff just… around. I don’t really consider that a flaw, because (like foreshadowing) that’s a part of the editing process, but still.
9: It’s in first person, but really should be in third, which is an editing nightmare to change.
8: My terrorists/freedom fighters flip-flop wildly between being entirely flippant about the whole thing and then way past the point of melodrama. As does my protagonist, now I think about it.
7: I entirely forgot about my Noble Companion and, last the reader hears of him, he’s unconscious in a building under evacuation.
6: I have no antagonist to speak of – just a few isolated petty or backstabbing sadists, the presence of which really doesn’t justify the severity of the protagonist’s actions. I finally managed an antagonist about three quarters of the way through, who does everything short of moustache-twirling in the efforts to get him to be evil enough to bother doing away with.
5: I’ve somehow managed to write a novel with absolutely no dramatic tension, despite the fact that every revelation comes as a complete surprise to the protagonist. How? Well… the revelations come so far out of left field that he’s not expecting anything to be tense about beforehand. And since he’s not actually trying to, you know, achieve anything except satisfy his curiosity…
4: Neither is there any sexual tension, because it turned out my protagonist was too hung up on his ex to fall for the femme fatale. Who also didn’t actually turn out to be all that fatale. Best laid plans, eh?
3: Even the romantic tension, which is intended to be exceedingly subtle, only shows up in three very short scenes with an almost entirely off-screen character.
2: If I could think of another sort of tension, it probably wouldn’t have that either.
1: My protagonist is seriously the most boring person alive. Or, you know, written. Which was kind of intentional, and what was I thinking?
So here’s my decision: I am officially abandoning my NaNovel. Sad, but not entirely unexpected – and I don’t consider it a waste in the least. What an experience of world building and characterisation and plot development and my own capacity to just write, and… wow.
We all had to write the fics we now cringe at to gain the skills to write the fic that’s our latest baby. I had to write Harry Potter and the Promise Ring before I had the skills to write His Son’s Father, and I definitely had to write His Son’s Father before I had anything like the skills to write The Mother of Invention or this crossover I’ve been promising everyone for a year. I’ve looked back on Promise Ring with a wince for years – and I’m just now reached the point where I’m starting to do the same with His Son’s Father. I needed to make the mistakes I’ve made to learn how to make them – to learn how to avoid making them.
Return to Sender was not exactly a misstep along the way, merely my first attempt to fly without the wires that have been holding me up all along. Of course it was filled with mistakes – how could it not be?
I could never have even started in on writing without the support of fanfiction – I simply couldn’t. Fanfiction gave me the framework to start, the framework of characters and a fantasy world that let me reach for the stars and develop a plot and suspense and action and adventure and romance and… to write what was in my heart and my head, bursting to come out, without having to worry about what I’ve always thought of as the hard bit: coming up the framework for the idea. With fanfiction, the framework is just there, and all I need to do is twist a detail or explore some unique possibility.
So what are the lessons I’ve learned from NaNoWriMo? Apart from the simple fact that wow, I really can get it out when I try, they’re too many and too nebulous to put into words. But I think the most important lessons I’ve learned are (not unexpectedly) about original characterisation.
Lesson 1: Protagonist / Point of View Character
My favourite characters in any story are always the normal ones, swept up in events beyond their control. There’s at least one character like that in pretty much every book or movie I’ve loved. They’re also particularly useful characters to have, because they allow easy exposition – the reader sees their expanding world through their eyes, pulling them into the wonder or terror of their new experiences.
I knew all this, so this is where I started with my NaNovel – I had a concept, and I gave the story a main character who was… incredibly normal and moderately content with his place in the strange world I’d created. He had everything he’d cared about stripped away by the ubiquitous evil organisation, and he struck back against the organisation and triumphed.
But all these normal characters had one other thing in common: an agenda. There was one thing they wanted more than life itself, even if they didn’t realise it until the moment of choice came, they took little steps towards it with every breath they took. I knew this component of a protagonist, too, but somehow… somehow, my protagonist ended up without an agenda. Sure, Gary has things taken away from him through the course of the story by the Evil Doers, things that rock his world and make him rethink his perceptions. But he’s indecisive to a painful extent. This was intentional, and turned out to be a strength in the end, but it meant that there was nothing he really felt all that strongly about – and when he saw things wrong with the world, he didn’t really think he could do anything about it or decide to do something about it until the opportunity was thrust upon him. He ended up doing the things he did simply because he had nothing better to do with his time, rather than because it was the deepest desire of his heart to achieve what was on the other side.
Now I’ve pinpointed the exact problem, it should be straightforward to fix, really – give him a bit of a temper, a bit of impulsive insatiable curiosity, and a much healthier dose of cowardice to overcome… or even just acknowledge that this is the case and bring the story to him rather than dragging him around to meet it. Changing his personality would make him less of a foil for his best friend, but would make things easier with the femme fatale as well as introduce a much-needed aspect of tension into his relationship with his love interest. Bringing the story to him would work, but requires a great deal more in the way of cleverness on my part to disguise the coincidences.
Neither is particularly impossible, but nor is either particularly easy.
Lesson 2: Antagonist
This is probably the single biggest problem with my NaNovel. My protagonist could sit in front of the television all day eating Cheezels if I had someone for the reader to hate – to really, really hate. Someone who, in attempting to make the protagonist’s life miserable beyond measure, sows the seeds of his own destruction. Someone in whose end the reader can rejoice, rather than just going “well, that was stupid of him”.
Sure, I’ve got a ubiquitous organisation that does Bad Things – bad enough that when I finally worked out how to destroy them on their own terms I started dancing around yelling “Take that!” But there’s no real Evil, justified or otherwise – and all my attempts to bring it in ended up with melodramatic unsupported and random Evilness or waxing lyrical on how it was a nice idea that just doesn’t work with corrupt and imperfect human beings carrying it out.
I think it would have actually worked out if I’d spent some more time in my antagonists pockets – if I’d actually developed of any kind of personal antagonist short of about a week before finishing and been able to give him a believable reason for acting the way he/his company was… I knew I was in trouble without a decent antagonist, I really did know it - I just had unwarranted faith I'd be able to sort him out and weave him in later, when he came to me.
Urgh. Good antagonists: the bane of any writer’s life.
Lesson 3: Supporting Cast
There wasn’t quite so much wrong with my supporting isn’t so much missing as underdeveloped. I mean, I’ve got some fantastic potential supporting characters – but that’s all they are. Potential. I never leave the viewpoint of my main character, and he simply doesn’t spend enough time with any of them to let them develop a rapport with the reader. When they’re there, they’re too busy spitting out vast swathes of expository dialogue to make any kind of positive impression. The main problem, though, was that I was having enough trouble dragging the main character around after me without any particular motivation to weave in more than a couple of supporting characters with any particular depth.
Actually, there isn’t really all that much to Lesson 3 that couldn’t have been merged into Lesson 2, but hey – with me, two’s just never enough.
The thing is: I could fix all this. I know where I went wrong, and I could fix it all – I could write another fifty thousand words from different viewpoints with their own agendas and subplots, I could cut or rewrite huge swathes of what I’ve written, I could fill out the world to be beautiful and consistent and absorbing and packed with characters who each follow their own path and story, I could give my main character an agenda and a swift kick up the rear end, and I could definitely create tension of some sort from each scene to disconnected scene…
I could also go back and fix some of the worst exposition in His Son’s Father, do a thorough rewrite of the first chapters of The Promise Ring, spend the rest of my life finishing off my AF/HP crossover, and never move forward with my writing career.
Or, I could say “lesson learned” and move on. I could start another story that’s got a main character who’s built around his agenda rather than having it spliced in later, that’s in my chosen genre of fantasy rather than Sci-Fi, where my supporting cast don’t lose their own agendas and storylines in my fight to make my main character behave – and most of all, that has a real antagonist right from the first chapter.
Funnily enough, I’ve got a plot – and a world – in my head, that sounds remarkably like that. Not because I’ve twisted it to fit my new realisations, but when I came back for a look at it I was surprised at how many it fit. It’s been resident in my upper brain space for about three years, but I’ve never written more than a few snatches from it. Theoretically, it’s a prequel to the original story that’s been in my head for about five years – it started out as deep background for that and grew from there into a wonderful deep and complex quest. I’m starting to dream it, I’m starting to daydream it, I’m starting to have proper flashes of it. This is what I must write.
April is approaching fast. I’ll planning to have another attempt at April Fools, only this time I’ll do it because I know I can: and why aim for only fifteen thousand when I know I can write fifty thousand? All I need to do is get my Remix and my Toolbelt article out of the way in the meantime. Easy. *cough*
In other news, since I am officially abandoning my NaNovel, I’m coming good on my promise. Anyone interested in reading 50,000 words of abysmal, inconsistent, entirely unforeshadowed and utterly unpolished first draft, by an author who’s never written a new world or a set of original characters in her life is welcome to ask me for a copy of the document. I refuse to allow myself be ashamed to let people see it the vapid combination of blandness and melodrama that characterises all my first drafts – this is what NaNoWriMo is about, after all: exuberant imperfection, quantity not quality, making mistakes… so that next time around, I can hopefully give it a better go at avoiding them.
With that glowing review of Return to Sender out of the way, anyone who still wants a copy is welcome to let me know. :)
Haha, that's so damned awesome.
LOL!!
Re: Haha, that's so damned awesome.