Paksworld

Book continues its happy gallop down the to the finish line, paying no attention to its writer.

I will say it’s interesting.   Though the newly introduced “character” has a regrettable tendency to spout infodump, I think it’s telling me, and it will be easy to prune that away so readers don’t have to deal with it.   (You think? comes the little voice in my head.  One of the little voices.)

Book has now reached 160,233 words (just checked) and I was going to stop for the day at 160,000 but the infodump of backstory is interesting enough that I kept going.  Also, when the infodump is done, I still want to know how A and B are going to do X, because to me it looks several stages below easy.

So…what can I say without spoilers?    Well, initially, I promised the editor that a major character would find a suitable spouse…and it looks like, although we’re a book late, we won’t be a spouse short.    Although there can’t be too many more plot bombs between now and that event, or it will be put off to book three and my editor (and possibly some of you) will organize a necktie party.

For one awful moment yesterday, I thought A (the surprise “I’m important, you need me” character) was about to morph into M (a known important but not POV character who’s been difficult lately) , but it turned out that although M is involved here, that wasn’t how.   My subconscious was simply introducing M so I’d be ready for one of A’s revelations.  B, who is a POV character, is now with A, and getting M out of a situation M caused is what’s holding up the reunion of all the important parties that will let me (finally, and I hope)  get the potential spouses in the same place at the same time long enough to share the moment (as it were.)   I fear that M may continue to be difficult.

I’ll mention at this point my theory about the fictional hinge.  (My term–I don’t think you’ll find it anywhere else.)   Every story–short or long–has a point in which it “turns the corner”.   Up to that point, it’s on one side of the mountain, or one side of the river,  and though its action has had ups and downs and turns (how many and how violent depend on length and type of story),  it’s unified as preparation.  Then it reaches the point in the story where there’s a view that reveals there’s more: more scope, more going on, more of the real terrain to be traveled.  Can be internal or external or both.  But from there, the story has a different energy and a different focus.  All the elements are in place for the rest of the story and the conclusion.  Now it’s the working out of what was started (everyone’s here; the party can begin.)

I call that point (which isn’t a literal point: it can last pages and pages–even, in multi-volume story arcs, a whole volume) the “hinge”.    For me, writing a story, there’s a feeling around the hinge point of the story that lets me know the direction’s changing.   Because I’m an instinctive writer, I don’t know where the hinge is until I get there.

The hinge itself doesn’t read like a mountaintop experience, and may in fact be a pass and not a ridgetop.  Be itself it has no climax, no “resolution” (the thing critics of multi-volume works usually rail against in the interior volumes.   But take a story you think is good, and cut it into thirds.  The hinge is in the middle third.   In a three-volume long story, the hinge is in the second volume.  In a one-volume story, it’ll be in the middle chapters.    The hinge is the weakest part of the story, as Story:  it doesn’t have, cannot have, a resolution.   So if you read the middle chapter or two out of the middle of a one-volume work, it’s unsatisfying.  Who are these people?  Why should you care?  And the end of those chapters feels unfinished (as it is.)

Forcing a hinge paragraph, chapter, or volume into the mold of a complete story throws off the next paragraph/chapter/volume at the beginning, unless the entire story is episodic (a string of equally rounded events with no strong overall story arc.    First you fight the tiger, then you fight the bandits, then you fight the typhoon, then you fight the pirates…and then you get home and write “My Adventurous Journey.” )    In long stories (like this one) it’s often possible to shape interior volumes–even the hinge volume–so there’s something to satisfy readers’ natural desire for a proper ending, but it’s not the real ending–it’s a sub-climax.    But the reader who’s aching for the whole big song-and-dance-with-trumpets-and-drums ending still thinks it’s a cheat.  It’s not a cheat.  It’s the natural result of writing something that doesn’t end with volume one but has a coherent story arc over the whole group.

We don’t have all the terminology for long groups of books.  To me, a “series” is a string of books in an episodic way:  each book has its own story arc, and the books are related in place, time, and character, but there is no story arc.  So what do we call groups of books that do have a story arc?  Um…uh…well, I call them a “group” once they get past trilogy.  (And the term trilogy is sometimes used for books that could stand alone but are related, usually with one protagonist.)   Or  “multi-volume novel,” which is accurate, but a mouthful.

Now back to seeing if A and B can get M out of M’s predicament.