Exciting news! This blog, with 49 posts, has already surpassed my old blog, with 159 posts, in terms of total pageviews. That happened much more quickly than I expected it to. Also, Soulwoven is now RANKED on Wattpad (#94 in Fantasy and #134 in Adventure)! I would eat a gummy worm in celebration, but I decided to be good today and not buy the 3 lb. bag of them that I saw on sale.
Right. On to a breakdown of Chapter Two of Soulwoven, which has now been up on Wattpad for a week. If you missed it, you can find the breakdown of Chapter One here.
Chapter Two is one of my favorite chapters of Soulwoven, mostly because I get to describe Eldan City for the first time, and because we get into Cole's head, which is a place I really like to be.
Spoilers below the fold!
Unlike Chapter One, Chapter Two takes place in one, unbroken scene. We start off in Cole's head as he and Litnig are leaving their house and stick with him as they discover that the Old Temple has been broken into and there's been a slaughter in the graveyard behind it. The chapter ends when the brothers find Ryse lying untouched in the midst of all the grisliness.
I'm doing several important things at once in Chapter Two. First, and most importantly, I'm letting the reader get to know Cole, who shares main character status pretty equally with Litnig in the book. Second, I'm continuing to develop the world. Third, I'm introducing several new sources of tension. And fourth, I'm showing the reader the alternating point of view structure that will continue throughout the book.
The continuing introduction of Cole takes place mostly through his narration. The point of view is very limited third person, so the reader only sees the world through Cole's eyes. And because Cole has opinions about everything, the reader gets to see a lot of them through his internal monologue. This chapter also provides a bit of a crisis point for Cole. On the one hand, he wants to help people, like his brother does. On the other, he's much more realistic about his own capability to do so, and he knows it won't help anyone if he gets himself hurt or killed. The second part of his brain tells him that the chances of he and Litnig doing anything useful are low at best and that they should clear out and keep themselves safe. But that part of him is wrong. Nothing bad happens to them. And Litnig is able to help Ryse. So in the back of his mind, Cole knows that if he had gotten his way, his friend and a bunch of innocent people would be worse off, and he and his brother wouldn't be any better off. Characters being wrong about important things, in my experience, almost always makes for an interesting situation.
At the same time I'm developing Cole, I'm continuing to work on Litnig. One of the reasons I chose the alternating point of view structure is because it offers incredible opportunities for character development. We've just had a chapter where we're in Litnig's head, seeing the world as he sees it. Now we get to see the world, including Litnig, from another point of view. Every time Cole describes Litnig, we learn a little more about both brothers, because we get to compare what we know is going on in Litnig's head with what Cole thinks is going on in Litnig's head, and we get to see what Litnig is doing without seeing his rationalizations on top of it.
The worldbuilding takes place primarily through Cole's descriptions of the city. The fact that Cole loves Eldan City helps with that. The city, and his relationship with it, are a big part of who he is. So it makes perfect sense for him to be thinking about what Temple Hill looks like, or how the River Eld smells, or the festivals and the Temples. Those are the things he thinks about every time he leaves his house. He's also among the smartest characters in the book. He connects old information with new information more readily than his brother, and he has more experience with violence, which makes him better equipped to describe the action in this chapter in particular. Trying to do the same descriptions through Litnig's point of view would be more difficult because he just doesn't see the world in the same way.
As for tension, right off the bat, we have the lingering question of why Cole decided to come with Litnig. That's resolved fairly quickly---we learn that he had a nightmare too, and he wants to get away from it. But he also feels less than convinced that it was a normal, run-of-the-mill nightmare, which continues to build tension around Litnig's dream and the events connected with it in the first chapter.
On the heels of that, the brothers see the murdered guards at the Old Temple, and the tension comes from a new angle, because we know that Ryse is inside and we suspect the brothers are going to go in after her. That question of, "Where is Ryse, and is she ok?" keeps tugging throughout the chapter, but there are other questions that start to crop up around it, like "Where did all these bodies come from?" "Will Litnig and Cole be able to help anyone?" "Are the people who did this gone?" and "Where did they come from and what did they want?" At the end of the chapter, the brothers find Ryse, but the question of whether she's really okay (Cole certainly thinks she isn't, but she and Litnig are acting like she is) remains unresolved, which I'm counting on to get the reader to turn the page again.
On top of all that, there's tension between the brothers. Cole doesn't want to be there, but he won't leave Litnig, and Litnig takes advantage of that to drag him into a dangerous situation. It's one thing to put your own life in danger. It's another thing entirely to feel like you've been dragged into it by someone else. That's a theme that will continue throughout the book.
To be honest, there isn't a lot I don't like about this chapter. On a sentence to sentence level, it's still not perfect. My writing isn't at the level of someone like China Mieville or Neil Gaiman. But the voice holds up okay, I think, and I'm reasonably certain I've done a good job of getting the big things right.
Chapter Three of Soulwoven, in which we get Ryse's point of view and the questions of "Is Ryse okay?" and "What did the people who did this want?" are resolved, goes up on Wattpad tomorrow! Check my Facebook page or Twitter feed for a link sometime in the afternoon.
Showing posts with label Breakdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Breakdown. Show all posts
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Ch. 1
Greetings gentle readers. For a while now, I've been kicking around the idea of doing blog posts about Soulwoven, and breaking it down structurally in terms of what happens when, why it does, and what I'm trying to do as a writer in any given chapter. The big problem with the idea has always been that most visitors to this blog probably haven't read Soulwoven, and certainly don't have it front of them to take a look at.
Well, now that I'm posting chapters of it on Wattpad, that's not a problem anymore.
So without further ado, I'd like to inaugurate a series of craft posts about my writing and what I'm trying to do with it. Spoilers and technical writing bits to follow, so be forewarned. :-)
We'll start with Soulwoven Chapter One.
Opening chapters of novels are, I think, the most difficult thing to write in the whole world. I have rewritten this chapter more times than any other piece of writing I have ever produced. It's probably on its 20th or 30th iteration, if you go all the way back to when I started writing the book ten years ago. To be totally honest, I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, and I probably never will be.
So! Big points. There are three sections in Chapter One of Soulwoven, each containing its own scene with its own little arc. I'll break them, and what I'm trying to do in each of them, down below:
Scene One: Litnig, Cole, and their father are delivering groceries. There's someone watching them as they do it, which is weird and makes Litnig uncomfortable.
This scene has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to establish the world, the main character, the voice, and immediate tension. And it needs to hook the reader along into going on to the next scene. To handle the first and the second, I drop us into the middle of a typical day in Litnig's life. He and his family are out delivering groceries, which is what they do. Litnig is curious but a little slow, Cole is sleepy and bored, and their father is grumpy and borderline violent. To handle the tension, I introduce something mildly creepy. There's a person watching Litnig. He's a kind of person Litnig has never seen before. He doesn't stop watching him throughout the whole scene. Litnig's father is dismissive of Litnig's worries. And the person watching has sharp, yellow teeth.
To establish the voice, I break rules. I open with a sentence that falls under several "thou shalt nots" of writing: it's got a cliche ("Once upon a time"), and it's got nothing particularly unique going on in it ("a young man opened his eyes"). It could be (and very well might be) the first sentence in any number of stories.
But it's also a one-sentence summary of this story, and one of my goals with it is to offer the reader the following information: I am going to try to do unusual and difficult things here. I am not going to follow all of the rules. If you're interested in that, and you think I can pull it off, then come along for the ride.
To get the reader to do that, I rely on the tension, and I end with a creepy image of the person watching Litnig smiling at him as he passes by.
Scene Two: Litnig, Cole, and their father return home. Their father starts beating Cole, and Litnig stops him.
By the time we reach this scene, things are hopefully flowing a little easier for the reader. They've made the decision to stick with me to this point, but I still need to hook them. This is the big sympathy scene in the first chapter. Cole does nothing wrong, and his father flies off the handle and starts pounding him. Litnig saves him. We learn a lot about both brothers in this scene---how they handle explosive situations (Litnig tries to defuse them, Cole sticks a firecracker into them), what they're capable of physically (Litnig is big and strong, Cole is not), and how much they think about what they're doing (Cole has a purpose, even when he's goading his father into hitting him. Litnig often just acts). Hopefully, by the end of it, the reader cares about both of them, and finds them interesting enough to continue.
Scene Three: Litnig has the first dream of his life. Something weird happens with the air and there's a scream. Litnig and Cole decide to try to find Ryse.
This scene is where we really start to dig into Litnig's head. I'm still trying to develop sympathy for Litnig, but I'm also sending him on his adventure. In the first scene, there's something weird going on, but it's unclear whether it's going to affect his life. In the third scene, there's something really weird going on, both for Litnig (the dream) and for the world he lives in (the scream), and it affects his life immediately. There's also additional world-building and a brief introduction of Ryse. And at the end, I try to set up a shift to Cole's point-of-view in the next chapter by moving the focus of the narrative from Litnig's actions to Cole's.
There are several things that I don't really like about this chapter. I don't like that it's split up into three scenes, because we won't see that again for another eight or nine chapters, and one thing I feel it's important to do in an initial chapter is to establish the type of structure the reader is going to see. The scenes are short, as well, and the whole just feels a little choppier than I want it to be. But there are distinct arcs to every scene. Combining them just wouldn't work because of that. I also thought at one point about breaking the chapter after scene two and starting Chapter Two with the events of scene three told in Cole's point of view, but Chapter Two feels pretty tight to me the way it is and I don't want to disturb it.
So that's it for Chapter One, really. I want to emphasize that I don't think much about these things when I'm writing. I don't plan this stuff out like this, and this is the first time I've ever written it down (That's one reason, actually, that I'm doing this at all. It's good exercise). When I write, I follow the story. I put characters in a situation, and then I let them react to it.
But when a chapter isn't working, I do think about things like this. It's an editing tool. "What am I trying to do here?" and "What do I need to do here?" are two of the most important questions you can ask yourself, and I'm never comfortable with a chapter until I can answer them.
Chapter Two of Soulwoven goes up on Wattpad tomorrow. I'll break that one down as well a little later on in the week.
Well, now that I'm posting chapters of it on Wattpad, that's not a problem anymore.
So without further ado, I'd like to inaugurate a series of craft posts about my writing and what I'm trying to do with it. Spoilers and technical writing bits to follow, so be forewarned. :-)
We'll start with Soulwoven Chapter One.
Opening chapters of novels are, I think, the most difficult thing to write in the whole world. I have rewritten this chapter more times than any other piece of writing I have ever produced. It's probably on its 20th or 30th iteration, if you go all the way back to when I started writing the book ten years ago. To be totally honest, I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, and I probably never will be.
So! Big points. There are three sections in Chapter One of Soulwoven, each containing its own scene with its own little arc. I'll break them, and what I'm trying to do in each of them, down below:
Scene One: Litnig, Cole, and their father are delivering groceries. There's someone watching them as they do it, which is weird and makes Litnig uncomfortable.
This scene has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to establish the world, the main character, the voice, and immediate tension. And it needs to hook the reader along into going on to the next scene. To handle the first and the second, I drop us into the middle of a typical day in Litnig's life. He and his family are out delivering groceries, which is what they do. Litnig is curious but a little slow, Cole is sleepy and bored, and their father is grumpy and borderline violent. To handle the tension, I introduce something mildly creepy. There's a person watching Litnig. He's a kind of person Litnig has never seen before. He doesn't stop watching him throughout the whole scene. Litnig's father is dismissive of Litnig's worries. And the person watching has sharp, yellow teeth.
To establish the voice, I break rules. I open with a sentence that falls under several "thou shalt nots" of writing: it's got a cliche ("Once upon a time"), and it's got nothing particularly unique going on in it ("a young man opened his eyes"). It could be (and very well might be) the first sentence in any number of stories.
But it's also a one-sentence summary of this story, and one of my goals with it is to offer the reader the following information: I am going to try to do unusual and difficult things here. I am not going to follow all of the rules. If you're interested in that, and you think I can pull it off, then come along for the ride.
To get the reader to do that, I rely on the tension, and I end with a creepy image of the person watching Litnig smiling at him as he passes by.
Scene Two: Litnig, Cole, and their father return home. Their father starts beating Cole, and Litnig stops him.
By the time we reach this scene, things are hopefully flowing a little easier for the reader. They've made the decision to stick with me to this point, but I still need to hook them. This is the big sympathy scene in the first chapter. Cole does nothing wrong, and his father flies off the handle and starts pounding him. Litnig saves him. We learn a lot about both brothers in this scene---how they handle explosive situations (Litnig tries to defuse them, Cole sticks a firecracker into them), what they're capable of physically (Litnig is big and strong, Cole is not), and how much they think about what they're doing (Cole has a purpose, even when he's goading his father into hitting him. Litnig often just acts). Hopefully, by the end of it, the reader cares about both of them, and finds them interesting enough to continue.
Scene Three: Litnig has the first dream of his life. Something weird happens with the air and there's a scream. Litnig and Cole decide to try to find Ryse.
This scene is where we really start to dig into Litnig's head. I'm still trying to develop sympathy for Litnig, but I'm also sending him on his adventure. In the first scene, there's something weird going on, but it's unclear whether it's going to affect his life. In the third scene, there's something really weird going on, both for Litnig (the dream) and for the world he lives in (the scream), and it affects his life immediately. There's also additional world-building and a brief introduction of Ryse. And at the end, I try to set up a shift to Cole's point-of-view in the next chapter by moving the focus of the narrative from Litnig's actions to Cole's.
There are several things that I don't really like about this chapter. I don't like that it's split up into three scenes, because we won't see that again for another eight or nine chapters, and one thing I feel it's important to do in an initial chapter is to establish the type of structure the reader is going to see. The scenes are short, as well, and the whole just feels a little choppier than I want it to be. But there are distinct arcs to every scene. Combining them just wouldn't work because of that. I also thought at one point about breaking the chapter after scene two and starting Chapter Two with the events of scene three told in Cole's point of view, but Chapter Two feels pretty tight to me the way it is and I don't want to disturb it.
So that's it for Chapter One, really. I want to emphasize that I don't think much about these things when I'm writing. I don't plan this stuff out like this, and this is the first time I've ever written it down (That's one reason, actually, that I'm doing this at all. It's good exercise). When I write, I follow the story. I put characters in a situation, and then I let them react to it.
But when a chapter isn't working, I do think about things like this. It's an editing tool. "What am I trying to do here?" and "What do I need to do here?" are two of the most important questions you can ask yourself, and I'm never comfortable with a chapter until I can answer them.
Chapter Two of Soulwoven goes up on Wattpad tomorrow. I'll break that one down as well a little later on in the week.
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