I Totally Fail at Posting
Mar. 2nd, 2019 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livilendOh my gosh, I haven't posted since December! Terrible. Bad me. I'm going to post about the novel I'm writing, because that's what's on my mind right now.
So I somehow managed to write an entire (short-ish, it's about 75,000 words) draft of a novel without ever figuring out the worldbuilding or the character arc. And I'm trying to go back and put those in now. This is awful. I would not advise writing this way, ever.
My problem is that I don't really care a lot about the worldbuilding? Well, that's one of the problems. The world is some flavor of alternate history USA, but the way I currently have it set up, there's not really a historical reason for things to be the way they are. Some things are different (e.g. there was a plague that happened about thirty years ago) but definitely not in a coherent way--there's no one thing that changed to make the timelines diverge. And I don't want to make it a wholly different world, because that's a lot of work and would change the flavor of the book significantly. I guess I'm mostly just resisting doing the research I'd have to do to fix it, because I'm not really a history buff.
My other problem is that I have a complex main character whom I understand pretty well, and she does grow over the course of the book, but it's not at all how you're supposed to do a character arc. You know, the thing where the main character starts out with one obvious flaw that's holding her back, and then has to confront that flaw and overcome it at the climax of the story. I did not even a little bit do that. If anything, it has a little bit of a tragic arc where things go badly because she doesn't change. But it's not really a tragedy.
Anyone have thoughts about character arcs? Like, is it possible to write a decent story without a coherent one?
So I somehow managed to write an entire (short-ish, it's about 75,000 words) draft of a novel without ever figuring out the worldbuilding or the character arc. And I'm trying to go back and put those in now. This is awful. I would not advise writing this way, ever.
My problem is that I don't really care a lot about the worldbuilding? Well, that's one of the problems. The world is some flavor of alternate history USA, but the way I currently have it set up, there's not really a historical reason for things to be the way they are. Some things are different (e.g. there was a plague that happened about thirty years ago) but definitely not in a coherent way--there's no one thing that changed to make the timelines diverge. And I don't want to make it a wholly different world, because that's a lot of work and would change the flavor of the book significantly. I guess I'm mostly just resisting doing the research I'd have to do to fix it, because I'm not really a history buff.
My other problem is that I have a complex main character whom I understand pretty well, and she does grow over the course of the book, but it's not at all how you're supposed to do a character arc. You know, the thing where the main character starts out with one obvious flaw that's holding her back, and then has to confront that flaw and overcome it at the climax of the story. I did not even a little bit do that. If anything, it has a little bit of a tragic arc where things go badly because she doesn't change. But it's not really a tragedy.
Anyone have thoughts about character arcs? Like, is it possible to write a decent story without a coherent one?
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 11:49 pm (UTC)