Just when you think it’s going smoothly and all will sail happily along a flowing tide into the sunset (can you tell it’s late and I’m punchy?\u00a0 I thought so) ….you find the Scylla and Charybdis of revision in your path.<\/p>\n
These problems take various forms, but always present as the writer’s need to show something from various angles\/viewpoints\/political or social stances…and the reader’s strong desire not to be caught in a whirlpool where the same situation is recounted over and over and over.<\/p>\n
When writing first draft,\u00a0 the dangerous sisters are obscured by the fascination of the characters who are doing whatever it is, and talking about it afterwards to others.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course the writer must show A talking to B, and then B giving his\/her version to someone else, and then R (who saw it only at a distance or came on the scene later) talling another version to S, and so on, because (as we all know in real life) every one of those versions will evoke a unique reaction in each hearer and each reaction can be a plot driver.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some of them absolutely will<\/em> be plot drivers.<\/p>\n But…readers do not like being told the same thing over and over (even in slightly different versions) …they become restive and even fretful (“What, you think I can’t read?\u00a0\u00a0 I know, I know,\u00a0 Gisela and Paolo are arguing in the library and there’s three walls of books and one wall with big windows and some decorative weaponry between them.\u00a0 I know<\/em> that already!”)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A bored or annoyed reader is not only coming unglued from the story, but pays less attention to the details that the writer carefully provided as clues to the plotworthiness of that conversation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And so will wake up some chapters downstream and say “Wait!\u00a0 That’s not fair!\u00a0 You didn’t say there was a dagger on that wall!” when Gisela grabs the dagger and stabs not Paolo but Anhelm.\u00a0 “Who’s Anhelm?\u00a0\u00a0 And I thought she was mad at Paolo!”<\/p>\n Never mind that forty pages back you showed Angelina telling Anhelm what Gavin told her about the argument, and thirty pages before that you showed Gisela telling Luis about it and why she blamed Anhelm.\u00a0\u00a0 Readers turned off their alertness whenever that library and Gisela and Paolo showed up yet again (yawn, grump) in various versions, so they missed it (along with the version that mentioned the dagger.)\u00a0\u00a0 If they had read and caught all that, they’d know that the moment Anhelm walked in on Gisela three days later, and said something snide about Paolo, he was a dead man.<\/p>\n My job as writer is to give you readers everything you need, exactly when you need it, to provide the best possible experience.\u00a0 Boring or annoying you is a failure of craft.\u00a0\u00a0 And I’ve been staring for several hours at a lovely big pointy-jaggedy Scylla of\u00a0 Really Important Stuff on the one hand and a busily\u00a0 churning Charybdis of\u00a0 Really Boring Repetition on the other.<\/p>\n Lots of other stuff has been accomplished, allowing me an ever clearer view of this dangerous pair and the very narrow passage between them. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have noted every chapter in which the same incident is retold.\u00a0 Now to figure out how to show that a) it is being retold without b) retelling it while c) imparting all the information that is new to the reader<\/em> (whether or not it’s new to the person hearing it in the book.)<\/p>\n Ideally the reader will be eager to find out how every new hearer receives the information, rather than bored by hearing it again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That will happen only if readers can trust that I’m not going to make them sit through the umpteenth recitation…if they can expect something worthwhile.\u00a0\u00a0 Easy in concept, yes?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0\u00a0 But it’s a narrow and tumultuous channel between not giving enough information and giving too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just when you think it’s going smoothly and all will sail happily along a flowing tide into the sunset (can you tell it’s late and I’m punchy?\u00a0 I thought so) ….you find the Scylla and Charybdis of revision in your path. These problems take various forms, but always present as the writer’s need to show […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,45,5],"tags":[62,51,107],"class_list":["post-980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-revisions","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980"}],"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=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":981,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions\/981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}