{"id":1303,"date":"2011-08-16T18:03:51","date_gmt":"2011-08-17T00:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1303"},"modified":"2011-08-16T18:03:51","modified_gmt":"2011-08-17T00:03:51","slug":"jiggety-jig-the-beat-goes-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1303","title":{"rendered":"Jiggety Jig (The Beat Goes On)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book faced me today with two of the most daunting scenes in the series…not the kind that twist your emotional core into a wad and then set it on fire, but technically<\/em> daunting as in “How the dickens do I even approach writing this?”<\/p>\n

One answer is “First make chocolate chip cookies and pick your music.”<\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0 I don’t normally stop to make chocolate chip cookies when I get stuck.\u00a0\u00a0 But I don’t normally get stuck in this particular way–pure technique problem, how to make words do something really strange.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Enough years in the business and the toolkit is fairly well stocked with tools and the hand with tricks.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So today, coming to a complete and frustrating halt only about 500 words into the day, I thought perhaps sugar and chocolate would convince the neurons progress was possible.<\/p>\n

Hence the chocolate chip cookies.\u00a0 And after that, and turning on some music…things did go better.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The technical challenge proved susceptible to brute force, at least in the first draft.\u00a0\u00a0 It was, however, a paragraph-by-paragraph slog.<\/p>\n

There’s deciding (or figuring out) what happened.\u00a0 Then there’s figuring out (or deciding) which character on scene did which part of it (some of them were cooperating, amazingly enough) and what they said\u00a0 and so on.\u00a0 Then there’s the technical side again:\u00a0 putting down the words that make what you just figured out (or decided) happened believable.<\/p>\n

And graceful.\u00a0 And emotionally satisfying.\u00a0 And smoothly intersecting the plot without the least sense of bumping abruptly from pavement to broken rock.<\/p>\n

That last bit will come (surely!!) in later drafts.\u00a0 At the moment, the transition is more like hitting the side of a barn at high speed.<\/p>\n

However, the baseline of what happened is finally (finally!) down on the page (in the computer, at least) and I have a better grasp of what it’s going to take to make it work.\u00a0\u00a0 What makes this particular set of scenes so difficult is the same as with others–the transitions have to work not only within Book IV, but within other volumes in the Paksworld groups.<\/p>\n

As I’ve hinted before in posts that involve the craft of writing, there are some things not to do in your first books…let the skills build up.\u00a0 Too many POV characters…flashbacks (especially complicated flashbacks) with their double transitions…etc.\u00a0\u00a0 When you first get on a horse,\u00a0 you should not gallop into a ring full of complicated jumps and go for the triple no-stride…same with writing.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m glad I have some experience under my belt on this one.<\/p>\n

And the total is now over 128,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book faced me today with two of the most daunting scenes in the series…not the kind that twist your emotional core into a wad and then set it on fire, but technically daunting as in “How the dickens do I even approach writing this?” One answer is “First make chocolate chip cookies and pick your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,5],"tags":[62,107],"class_list":["post-1303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303"}],"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=1303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1304,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303\/revisions\/1304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}