Last night, I began revisions on chapter six, the one that was giving me fits in yesterday’s post. I think I figured out why it wasn’t working. Two main reasons:
1) I had an important scene shown from my female protagonists POV (point of view); then I switched scenes and went into my male protagonist’s POV and had him remember, rather awkwardly, what had just happened in the previous scene.
2) I was having my male protagonist respond to something in a way that wasn’t in keeping with his character. He was getting angry and tormenting himself over something he saw—or thought he saw—when truly, for the type of person he is, a more realistic response would have been concern, maybe a bit of worry, but certainly not anger.
So I am working through the chapter anew, with those things in mind. Wonderful author Julie Lessman, who I mentioned in yesterday’s post, offered me some examples from her own fiction that helped clear up the POV dilemma. She affirmed something I had figured out for myself last night. That was a lovely relief!
The revisions are going well, I think. But I’m realizing a new problem: When we plot our novels, we have all these scenes in mind; we might see them in a specific order and/or know the calendar dates on which they occur, etc. But when we sit down to write, we cannot just have our characters hopping from one of those scenes to the next. There are things that must connect those big scenes—little moments that give the characters’ lives a human quality, that give them (and the reader) ”down time.”
Those spaces in between big scenes are the hardest things to write. They’re nothing, really; just “filler,” in a way. Yet they are the threads that hold the whole mess together. They are essential, and knowing which little bits of a character’s day or week or month to include—to show him or her having a “real life” in between the big scenes—is not easy at all.
I find myself writing all kinds of weird stuff, such as characters having random, odd-ball conversations with other characters or making trips to the grocery store or grading papers (one of my characters is a teacher). Not for pages and pages, but maybe just a paragraph here or there, depending. And it’s when I’m writing those little bits that I feel the least in control of my novel.
Am I unique? I don’t think so. But I wonder if this part ever gets easier.
