{"id":1058,"date":"2011-02-12T09:06:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T15:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1058"},"modified":"2011-02-12T09:06:48","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T15:06:48","slug":"timing-isnt-quite-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1058","title":{"rendered":"Timing Isn’t (quite) Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the difficulties of restarting a story last seen twenty years ago is that for readers who read the original books when they came out–even five or six years later–it feels as if there should be more time between Oath of Gold<\/em> and Oath of Fealty<\/em> than there is.\u00a0\u00a0 Intellectually, these readers may grasp that the second Oath<\/em> picks up where the first one left off, but they’ve experienced years in between and they aren’t the same readers they were when they finished the first three books.<\/p>\n

I was reminded again of this situation when someone commented that we hadn’t seen anything of Achrya since she showed up at the Halveric steading in Oath of Gold<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, in book time, less than\u00a0 six months by the end of\u00a0 Oath of Fealty<\/em>…not that long a time for even a minor deity to spend plotting another campaign. \u00a0\u00a0 But to a reader who’d read the Paks books years earlier, it feels longer.\u00a0\u00a0 No amount of clue-placement by the writer can undo the effect of real life time passing.<\/p>\n

Another element is that the new books cover less time per volume than the older ones.\u00a0 That’s for several reasons–but the biggest bar to getting through the calendar faster is multiple viewpoints.\u00a0\u00a0 The more main\u00a0 viewpoints you have in a story, and the more “separate” the POV characters are (in space, in events), the more wordage you need to establish the POV characters as main characters.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What’s happening to them isn’t the same all the time.<\/p>\n

For these books, it was either have multiple viewpoints or have multiple volumes each with one main viewpoint, as\u00a0 Lawrence Durrell did in The Alexandria Quartet<\/em>, in which the same time period was from different POVs in three volumes, and then the final volume moved on and combined things.\u00a0\u00a0 And that’s because the long story arc involved the three main characters as joint protagonists, affecting each other and the story arc in almost equal amount.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I went with multiple viewpoints in each book to keep from going over the same time repeatedly.\u00a0 Like all choices, it had consequences.<\/p>\n

It’s taken me almost three volumes to cover one year.\u00a0\u00a0 Admittedly, it’s a year in which a lot has happened in everyone’s life…someone is in the frying pan or the fire all the time, and sometimes that’s more than one in the same stretch of time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is the source of that mistake I’ve spoken of before, that the events in Luap’s book where Kieri and Paks are involved happen at the wrong time.\u00a0\u00a0 If I’d known then what I found out two years ago…that mistake would not have happened, but it did.<\/p>\n

I suspect that new readers–those who are only now getting involved in the Paksworld stories–will have less temporal discontinuity problems–they may find it jarring to be in someone else’s head, but the temporal gap in book time will feel like the real gap to them.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Book IV is now over 55,000 words, about a third of its final length (though not yet a third of its likely first-draft length.)\u00a0 That’s guessing, of course.\u00a0 It might be more or less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the difficulties of restarting a story last seen twenty years ago is that for readers who read the original books when they came out–even five or six years later–it feels as if there should be more time between Oath of Gold and Oath of Fealty than there is.\u00a0\u00a0 Intellectually, these readers may grasp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,61,5],"tags":[106,62,20,107],"class_list":["post-1058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-contents","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1059,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/1059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}