It happens like this just about every day, at least those days I'm supposed to be writing a blog. I'm just about to pack up and go to bed, when it suddenly occurs to me I haven't written the damn NaNoWriMo blog.
I then spend about ten seconds deciding whether to give it a miss or not, the outcome of which will largely be determined by whether I bunked off the night before. In fact last night I didn't give the blog a single thought. So here we are, sitting here at 00:23hrs on the 15th November, trying to be insightful.
Today was one of those writing days, NaNoWriMo or otherwise, when the needs of the character changed the needs of the story. In my extensive plotting of The Handyman, I had cleverly created a moment halfway through act one that would serve as a catalyst for the rest of the book. It was a moment when Daniel looks through the pictures of his dead wife's camera having dreamed of her asking him 'What do you see?' I go through this whole section as he hunts through the pictures as if we are looking through found footage. He sees her life and world through her eyes. One largely unknown to him. It is a lovely moment and frustrating for him because he cannot see anything that might lead to her murder.
I wrote the scene today. I like it a lot and it works real well. This moment pays off later in the story. It immediately leads onto a scene with actual found footage of her murder, taken by the murderers. In looking through the footage he hear's one of them laugh and his revenge gene kicks in. He is now on board for the main story.
It all sounds cool, and reads pretty well in a story outline. The trouble is in writing the two back to back found footage scenes you get found footage overload. The two scenes show different mediums of camera and video, have largely different content but have very similar narratives. They are essentially the same scene played out twice in a row. Readers will disengage.
The solution so far is to move Daniel doing the camera review to a much earlier stage during the setup in the first half of act one. And then think of some imaginative way of revealing the video found footage, which I haven't quite come up with yet.
Hopefully next time we meet in the middle of the night, which should be Saturday(ish) at the latest, I will have. See you there.
<NaNoWriMo - The Handyman 12 - NaNoWriMo - The Handyman 18 >
I then spend about ten seconds deciding whether to give it a miss or not, the outcome of which will largely be determined by whether I bunked off the night before. In fact last night I didn't give the blog a single thought. So here we are, sitting here at 00:23hrs on the 15th November, trying to be insightful.
Today was one of those writing days, NaNoWriMo or otherwise, when the needs of the character changed the needs of the story. In my extensive plotting of The Handyman, I had cleverly created a moment halfway through act one that would serve as a catalyst for the rest of the book. It was a moment when Daniel looks through the pictures of his dead wife's camera having dreamed of her asking him 'What do you see?' I go through this whole section as he hunts through the pictures as if we are looking through found footage. He sees her life and world through her eyes. One largely unknown to him. It is a lovely moment and frustrating for him because he cannot see anything that might lead to her murder.
I wrote the scene today. I like it a lot and it works real well. This moment pays off later in the story. It immediately leads onto a scene with actual found footage of her murder, taken by the murderers. In looking through the footage he hear's one of them laugh and his revenge gene kicks in. He is now on board for the main story.
It all sounds cool, and reads pretty well in a story outline. The trouble is in writing the two back to back found footage scenes you get found footage overload. The two scenes show different mediums of camera and video, have largely different content but have very similar narratives. They are essentially the same scene played out twice in a row. Readers will disengage.
The solution so far is to move Daniel doing the camera review to a much earlier stage during the setup in the first half of act one. And then think of some imaginative way of revealing the video found footage, which I haven't quite come up with yet.
Hopefully next time we meet in the middle of the night, which should be Saturday(ish) at the latest, I will have. See you there.
<NaNoWriMo - The Handyman 12 - NaNoWriMo - The Handyman 18 >
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