I really like the structure of Carol Berg's duology, Flesh and Spirit, Breath and Bone. Her hero, a rascal and deserter, starts with the goal of surviving the night. Then his goal gets a little bigger: he wants to survive a few months, in a comfy monastery, until he decides where to go next. Then his goal gets bigger and bigger, until finally: his goal is to save the world (literally).

Berg doesn't tip her hand from the beginning. However, I'll bet that Berg knew where she wanted her hero to end up. She brought him there incrementally, his growing realization of his own power like stepping stones. And she does let us know early on that the character has some special qualities that will eventually force him into a bigger arena than the one he's been in so far.

The thing is: the duology didn't sag. I didn't have that feeling of having to endure an unending problem for two books. (As in Stephen Donaldson's books, except the problem was extended to three--six--no, nine--books.) There were overarching problems and mysteries--the succession war fought by creepy princes, the hero's personal dilemma of being a fugitive, the book of maps. But the hero was always making progress. Then his progress would be subsumed by higher stakes, so the book kept moving in a new direction.

This one pass revision stuff: it's interesting. Keeps me from losing the forest for the trees. (Not that this is really the first revision. I'm just treating it as if it is.)

My usual MO is to do "serial revision" (overlapping tinkering) Refraining has made me able to pull back and see the big picture and how the scenes work: which ones do, which ones don't.

I'm now teetering on the brink of eliminating a POV. I've already easily deleted two of his scenes because nothing much happened in them. Just expository musings. They don't tell anything that the other scenes in the book haven't already told or could tell in a more interesting context.

The pro side of keeping his scenes is that he's a sociopathic person with tons of power (ie, the evil overlord). His creepiness creates a sense of danger.

But he might just have to settle for being his nasty self through the eyes of others. Bonus: an element of uncertainty, because on the outside, he's not all that bad

My mom and I share books sometimes. She's an avid romance reader and she's got me on Victoria Holt, a romance/mystery writer, more in the line of Daphne du Maurier than Harlequin. I'm reading King of the Castle now.

Holt's writing is more slowly paced than today's (her career spanned the 30s through the 70s). Also, if you've read one of her books (or any romance book) you absolutely know that in the end, the heroine will get the man of her dreams. Said man is, of course, the prime suspect, with the heroine's quest being to absolve him. The point is, you don't know exactly how she will do this (and will she keep the faith?) and who the guilty party will be.

Holt's characters are stereotypical and the plots formulaic; how else would she have pumped out 200 some books in her career? Still, I'm enjoying the sheer escapism of her books, and her craft, and the way she captures her period settings with details. It's really interesting, too, to see how Holt paces the revelations of her clues and red herrings simultaneously with character development.

At Viable Paradise, Jim MacDonald told us of making model submarines with his father. His dad would always put a fridge in the sub, and in the fridge were little hams. Once the submarine was finished, it would be sealed. No one would ever see the fridge or eat the hams. But Jim and his dad knew they were there. (I found that story very endearing, and Jim's family very endearing, too)

Jim's point (the way I take it) is that a writer must also have a stash of vivid, real details inside a story. The reader may never see them, but their presence gives the story depth and context.

What's the story told by the house in Connie Toebe's 13 Days of Stolen Secrets?

Further to epicyclic redrafting...

What's helped me is making sure I write a paragraph describing each scene. I use an excel sheet. Each scene is on a row. Columns are: time (season, in this case); POV; description of the scene; and various themes and backstories I'm trying to keep straight. I use autosort to check for continuity of themes and POV.

If I discover that something needs to be filled into a previous scene, I can go to my spreadsheet and make a note in red that I can pick up later, either at the end of the writing day or at some date in the future when I'm actually wrapping this thing up, depending on how in depth the change is. In depth stuff waits in case there's some turn that will render it moot.

Knowing the story of what happens in the scenes ahead of time makes them a lot more fun to write. Not to mention giving the story more definition. I love writing description and characters, but keeping the story line up front is tough for me (as anyone who was in my crit group probably guessed).

These paragraphs will come in handing when I'm writing a summary, too.

I'm not good at sticking religiously to a system, but this one is really helping. 

For several books and a few series, I get around halfway through and I'm bored. It's frustrating, because up to then I've been having a great time.

The culprit seems to be chain conflict: Bad-bunch A chases hero. Bad-bunch B shows up at the horizon. Hero escapes Bad-bunch A (in a flaming crash, hail of arrows, etc). Hero catches breath, maybe kisses someone while Bad-bunch B gets closer. Bad-bunch B chases hero. Bad-bunch C shows up at the horizon....

You get the picture. The hero might get more or less skilled at dodging his/her opponents, the bad guys might get better weapons or just plain meaner, deep psychological moments may occur, a love interest pops in and out, but then it's back on the chain gang. Nothing (and noone) has really changed.

It's the basic sequence of a James Bond movie. Very entertaining for a few hours, but only because there are visuals and sound to help out. (Ian Flemming's crazy plot twists get us through the books, which are barely more than novellas.)

I think of some of the books I love, that I've read through and through again. Harry Potter, O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, LOTR, Anne Rice's Chronicles (most, anyway). The protagonists get into one scrape after another, but you can never predict or take hold of them. The conflicts are fundamentally different from each other, whatever the overarching storyline may be.

David Sheppard hits it well:

A novel is a long narrative art form, and reader interest can only be maintained by constant change. This means that the nature of the conflict, not just the intensity of it, must also change.

Sheppard suggests that a reversal in conflict is the remedy for "mid-novel sag."

In James Fenimore Cooper’s, The Last of the Mohicans, the Indians chase the white men for the first half of the novel, and the white men chase the Indians for the second half.

That doesn't resonate with me, but I'm keeping an eye out for it. My vote would be for character development as a primary agent of change. Harry Potter goes from child to young man, in the process learning his true identity and potential, literally and psychologically. The same kind of thing happens with the hobbits in LOTR. A well-worn theme, but worn so well in the words of a good storyteller.

...or a kinder, gentler version of "kill your darlings"

(from novelist Diana Peterfreund)

"At my very first TARA meeting in 2002, the now-bestselling Karen Hawkins gave a lovely speech about writing humor, but in the course of the speech, she gave me one of the best pieces of writing advice I have ever received: Love the book, not the scene. Not the scene, not the line, not the sunset not the quip, not the juicy secondary character, not the saucy shake of the head that the heroine makes. Love the book, not the scene. We've all been there. We've all written lines, scenes, descriptions, and characters that we absolutely ADORE. They're so cute, so funny, so poignant, so perfect... well, except for in the service for which they've been created, which is to make your book perfect.

"You don't want to lose them, They're too good to banish from your pages. So you try to work around them, because you know that they aren't right for the book. At best, this produces a book with an off note, a flat key in the midst of a beautiful melody. At worst you get completely off track with your book, subverting your entire story for the sake of this one perfect scene that you can't bear to part with.

"Stop that. Stop it right now. Love the book, not the scene. Extract it carefully if you must, then preserve it in a little file for wayward scenes that are beautiful -- but remove it from your book before it becomes a cancer. Love the book, not the scene. I think it's Faulkner who calls this "Killing your babies." I've also heard it referred to (by slightly less paternal types) as "killing your darlings." No matter, it all means the same thing. If you love something, but it doesn't work, take it out. Love the book, not the scene."

Week before last I was at Viable Paradise, a SFF writer's workshop. Jeff and Julia have good write-ups on what was said in the lectures.

I submitted the first two chapters of a novel. Here are some of the main points of the feedback I got, which will hopefully be helpful to other writers.

• A first chapter is a very special thing. You just can't cram too much into it, even though you're dying to explain everything.
• Need to have a "ticking time bomb" right from the start. The chapter takes too long to get into the story.
• Tension is not the same as conflict. The way I read this is: conflict is an overall problem: tension is what your character is experiencing.
• The world-building is thorough, but overwhelming. Too many synthetic words, too many races of people, too many references to geographical places. Basically, there's too much too fast that reader's expected to learn.
• Description needs to be simplified. Fussy and overwrought. People will skim that kind of writing. True; I've done it myself.
• Need "beats," breathing space.
• Sentences need to be more concrete. Don't be afraid of simple sentences.
• The book is a cross-over fantasy and science fiction. I like that. Maybe that means I'm entitled to call it "speculative fiction"? Much more majestic sounding.

The combination of lectures, group critique, one-on-ones with the instructors, Q&A "collegiums" is like rocket-fuel for a writer's brain. Add in a group of extremely (to me) sociable people, and it's both wonderful and overwhelming.

Teresa warned that a midweek meltdown is normal for VPers. I had mine on arrival, when nobody was around. Thought I got off lucky until I got back home and had another. Reading my fellow VPers' blogs and emails helped cheer me up again. Pretty much recovered now.