Editing Our Own Fiction - "How To" Books - How Not be a DNF
Does that stack of books look familiar?
I've read most of them, and half a dozen more, at least, plus a few buried deep in my Kindle. The Three-Act Story structure. Archetypes. Putting Fire in Your Fiction. How to Write a Best Seller.
I invested four years of full-time beta-reading, proofreading, critiquing, and submitting my own prose for the perusal (or wrecking ball) of others, in an internet writing workshop. That was where I met @rhondak. And a lot of other really good people.
My prose is lovely, by consensus; my characters authentic and memorable; too bad I don't have the guts to
Torture the Protagonist
and create intense conflict and tension. We know the drill. But, but, so many thrillers (even best sellers) fail to thrill me. The action, pace, plot, suspense, are all there in ways I do not achieve in my own writing, but so often, the conflict is contrived, and the characters do incredibly stupid things because if they didn't, we'd have no story. I'd rather read Jane Austen, uneventful as her quaint romances are compared to, say, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity. My husband can't watch ANY Jane Austen movie on TV (too boring). But he's watched Outlanders. Lots of violence! Way more "torture the protagonist" than I care to see when I escape into the world of fiction.
source
@negativer
is the first Steemit author to come to mind whenever I think of torturing the protagonist - AND the reader! His World War II soldier tore my heart out. The real-life story of his collie is the worst thing a child can imagine. Sadly, @negativer the adult is now capable of imagining far, far worse.
I despair of my writing,
yet I keep writing, mostly for myself, and for the occasional "Lovely prose!" and the literary reader like @raj808, who has single-handedly kept me from giving up.
Age 55 came and went,
but I'm not 60 yet, and as long as I live and breathe, there's time to bring my prose to life.
5-Minute Freewrite (thanks, @mariannewest!)
have liberated dozens of characters from the swamps, deserts, caves, and urban underground of my imagination.
What to do with them?
In November, I took One-Eyed Emil, an English patient, and a fugitive German doctor from a short story contest @gmuxx had hosted and turned them into a 50,000 word novel that starts well but ends stupidly and ineffectually. Oh, it was just a first draft; I've had December and January to remodel and rebuild the thing; yet I have not brought myself to look at it again, knowing it's an embarrassment, and that a college friend I met in 1980 could not bring himself to keep reading (or tell me how bad it really is), and another college friend (1985) started but didn't finish. On the bright side, at least two @freewritehouse members did read the whole thing and said nothing bad about "Lady Graves," but I have a lotta lotta lotta work ahead to make this story marketable and readable, not a DNF.
DNF - "Do Not Finish"
is the kiss of death for a storyteller.
So, either my fiction dies, or my characters suffer (and die! some will die!).
It is only human nature to be cruel, selfish, and violent, after all, and I am a hopeless idealist if I sweep that aside and write Disney endings.
Even Disney tortures the characters before letting them live happily ever after.
Check Out The @FreeWriteHouse Prompt Of The Day By @MarianneWest
I am a firm believer that there is a reader for the kind of story you like to write. They are lovely and there are readers out there who do not want their characters to be tortured - at least not very much.
I know that all writing workshops say conflict, conflict, conflict. But I am with you - when characters do stupid things just because we need some mishap, I get annoyed and I don't want to read the story anymore.
I know that so many scoff at romance - but sweet romance is a thing. And people are reading it, buying it, and enjoying it. Lots of people. Intelligent and sophisticated people.
Why torture yourself to write something you don't enjoy? How about embracing writing for people that love what you put out and are willing to buy it.
Spread the joy, my friend. You might not get a Nobel Prize for literature but you might get thousands of fans...
Just saying.
Your work is beautiful and don't you think it is a bit selfish to keep it to yourself instead of sharing it?
Big hugs to you!!
I love you Marianne!!
I do love a good romance (Jane Austen, for one). It's the tropes that grate on me. The same conflicts, misunderstandings, cliches, book after book.
LOL - I love this concept that it could be selfish of me to hide my writing in some drawer instead of putting it out there (that one-in-million reader might find it and like it!).
Thanks again - you and #freewritehouse have done so much to keep me going whenever I've been ready to give up the pen for good!
My point is that you don't have to do the cookie-cutter kinds. You can do your kind! You never know if you won't be the leader in the new field of non-cookie-cutter romance.
Really, the world has so much negative stuff happening that there are many (me included) that do not want to read or watch more conflict. I get that when I take in the news, watch the homeless struggle and much more.
i say, shut down the inner critic and remember that everything had naysayers at one point. Like the Beatles - and look what happened to them LOL
Thank you!
And btw I do realize "torture" just means throwing obstacles at the protagonist, not blood and guts and all that Outlander and Vikings level of brutality. I will bring myself to let "the worst thing possible" happen and turn it into a bonus. I also realize that some of my most beloved novels are so obscure nobody else has heard of the author - Ardyth Kennelly in particular but also Rod Usher, E.E. Giorgi, and others. Nobody at Steemit would recognize the name Guy T Martland if I hadn't lured him here. (He left a year ago after the IOW anthologies tanked.) Anyway, what I realize is that the fiction I love is so obscure, hardly anyone else knows about it or cares. And if my own writing falls into the same obscurity, so be it. We should write the stories WE want to read, I'm told, and I'm not there yet - it's like me with a canvas trying to paint and it never turns out anything like I envisioned - but practice. Hence, 5-minute freewrite!! Great way to flex those writing miles and stir the imagination. Again thanks Marianne.
Cheering you all the way until you are there!
You realize of course that a lot of what becomes popular has not so much to do with the quality of the work or its likeability. Often, it is be at the right place at the right time or who you know.
So, those writers nobody else knows - maybe they just didn't have the luck to be discovered.
They were published but even so "didn't have the luck to be discovered." True, that! And even though I discovered them and bought copies and wrote glowing reviews, STILL their stories collect dust in old book stores. The beauty of e-books and Indie Authors is that so many more writers get to put their stories out there. And in "the cloud," no dust collects.
Thanks yet again @mariannewest!
"Did not finish."
A friend I've had for 17 years started reading my story on Kindle Unlimited. Being the obsessive person that I am, I stalked my Kindle Pages Read every hour, eagerly awaiting for him to whip through each page and enjoy my story. He was the only person reading on Unlimited, and only Australian overall so that made it easier to stalk! Muahaha! The stats say he made it to the end of Katea's first day before he never looked at it again. ;)
I like Lady Graves and Herr Doktor and the basic story! Some added 'torture' would be great; a sense of danger since he's a fugitive, someone in the tavern thinking the disguised Lady looks familiar, flirtations with the strapping blonde lad --ugh, the customary love triangle... "customary"... write what we want; not what is "expected". :) I love Helga, she needs to thrust herself into more background scenes and haunt our Lady's dreams with her "displays", a different kind of protagonist torture! Haha. So much can be done and I feel that you can make something soso wonderful out of it!
Backstory to what I'm about to say - Steemit post "Super Nostalgic Book Babbles"
I've been writing this story I keep rambling about for going on twenty-two years now. Every year the trilogy changes a tiny bit, or a new thing pops into mind, so much that in my head it's no longer a trilogy but a series of four. Possibly five depending on how my main-character-you-don't-realise-is-the-main-character-until-the-end returns to where he belongs.
I started with a dream. I was writing myself into a fantasy world to escape my real world. Then another character came along. Then a backstory wanted to be written. Then that backstory became my new love and focus and is all I've obsessed over for five years. It's only now I'm brave enough to finally DO that torture instead of imagining it and crying about it because it upsets me and breaks my own heart.
Torturing the protagonist = torturing ourselves. :) It's hard. But it can be done! And I believe you can do it!
It's so difficult sometimes to look at your own work objectively. I hope you keep working on the novel until you're satisfied with it.
Ha ha, and yes beating up the characters some can really bring a story to life 😉
It speaks to an underlying sadistic streak in humanity I think. Although the majority of us would never knowingly hurt anyone or want to perpetrate violence/conflict, most people need to see these things in the stories they read to stay interested.
The strange duality of humankind.
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Aka the triune brain or the lizard brain - that "underlying sadistic streak in humanity." We are a fairly recent evolutionary species, and if you'd rather say creation, I say the Creator still has some tinkering to do....
And after watching "Vikings" on Netflix, I'm thinking football and other national sports are serving a vital function in giving humans an outlet for fighting without killing for real.
Thanks Raj!
I was watching a college writing class video by Branden Sanderson (one of my favorite authors), and he said something to the rough effect of 'I have a friend that I have help read and edit all my first drafts. That's all he's ever seen of my work. One day he actually read one of my finished, published works. After, he told me 'I forgot you're actually a really good writer!'"
So, first drafts are known to be terrible and ugly. It's a given. Maybe by draft 7 you're starting to see the shape of what you intended. Definitely don't give up! Find the gold in your draft, cut out the dirt, and make something you're happy with!
Awwww, thank you -- you've delivered just the message I needed!
Ugh, I am sixty, and I can totally relate, and then some.
At least you're actually working on your novel!!! I keep telling myself I'll get back to mine, after all, I only started researching it in 1995, but to date . . . though I occasionally flesh out a new scene . . . I've yet to really go back and reread what I've written to date.
Which might be a good thing. My story takes place on (at least) two timelines, aka "then" and "now," and my initial go round with NaNoWriMo saw me complete roughly 35,000 words of the "then" timeline.
I'm currently editing a three-volume nonfiction ebook series, and I keep telling myself that, once they're done and released, then I'll turn my efforts toward finally finishing the novel that has been keeping my obsession alive for all these years.
But then my ego kicks into high gear, by which I mean my basic overriding fear of being seen, and I remind myself yet again that my "real" talent is nonfiction, and who do I think I am to buck that?
The good thing is that torturing my characters is essentially built into the events against which I've set my story, so at this point I basically have to lock myself in a room for a month, and bang out the rest of the story.
Easier said than done. ;-)