I wrote unexpectedly efficiently today. Due to scheduling issues, I got started later than is normal by nearly an hour. Yet here it is, 5 o'clock, and I'm writing my blog after updating my TimeGlider and mulling over the pacing of the story. I was expecting to be hammering away for another hour, yet I'm getting the distinct feeling that I should stop....and that I should keep going. It's kind of rough, to be honest. I don't know if I really want to go on, mostly because I postponed the consequences of what I wrote about last time (a character getting stabbed) by shifting to a different character for this chapter. But I can't keep the reader in too much suspense--if I don't shift back and deal with the stabbing, then it's going to feel like I'm just toying with the readers, and that's lame. I don't want that to happen.
Of course, I could go and write a flashback...but I'm not certain that I want to do that right now, since the scene that's cooking in my head is in a different place entirely. It's hard to write in less ambiguous terms than what I've said here, so, rather than spinning my wheels, I'll just move on to something else that I wanted to discuss.
I'm taking a class on World War I right now from one of my favorite professors of history. The class is what gets me out of the house each Saturday, which is a good thing, since it gives me a secondary reason for coming down to UVU besides the urge to write. The thing is, the topics I learn about are extremely depressing (like, majorly depressing), and I get a little out of sorts. The scenes that I'm writing about are serious--I've yet to be able to write anything even approaching comedy in my stories--but they're of a different type of seriousness. So I'm having a hard time channeling that emotion that I get from studying history into my writing. One thing's for certain, however: I'm not writing Calistar correctly.
Calistar is a warrior. He grew up wanting to be in the Jajiini militia (their armed forces) and following in his older brother's footsteps by fighting for his god and his country. But along the way, something in him changed and eventually he became a pacifist--personally, not one that cared if others felt the same way. He just wanted to stop hurting others, despite the fact that he could do it so well.
My problem with Calistar is that he isn't a soldier who has all of the right characteristics. One of the things I've mentioned before is that Calistar's precursor was Victor from Tales from the Flame. Victor and Calistar share the ability to be fighters who want to give it up, though in Victor's case it's a little bit different, since he has magical powers that are driving him crazy and making him want to kill. At any rate, Cal made the active, conscious choice not to murder or hurt people any more, but his weakness that carried over from Victor was that he's always in a situation where violence is called for. While that serves my purposes in the story, it doesn't feel authentic.
Perhaps I need to indulge in a bit of imaginative suffering and go through the flashback of Calistar's first battle. I don't think that it affected him enough. I don't think he became the kind of disturbed individual that wars give us. My professor today pointed out that there are generational consequences for being exposed to war--domestic abuse from returned veterans on their families, the insanity of the men as they try to cope with being home again having seen what they have seen, and many more important, forgotten things. Cal doesn't operate that way. He's not struggling enough with the choice and the reality. He isn't feeling the pain of war as deeply as he should.
Then again, we're talking about modern war as opposed to medieval warfare. Perhaps there's a difference in how a soldier responds to seeing a shell turn his friend into a geyser of gore and dirt as opposed to how a soldier responds to the feeling of his own sword driving through armor and grating against the ribs of his enemy. I don't know. But I worry that an ethical, moral person who knows that killing is wrong will have to face the consequences of choosing against what is right, and, having never done it, I won't be able to really express the problems and difficulties that derive thereby. Or maybe I'm just worrying over nothing.
Different Topic
I'm having the most curious feeling about all this, though, that I'm going to go ahead and express, even though it sounds silly: I'm looking forward to doing revisions on this thing. I actually am...I can hardly wait to have the whole manuscript in my hands--even though I probably won't use the hard copy for my revisions--and knowing that I've put the ideas down. I'm not casting about for the next story and eager to see the end of this one. In fact, I think I might be trying to add complications to the story just so that I can keep going on it and not have it end. (I'm fighting the impulse.)
This leads me to another possibility, one that I may have mentioned in the last 20 logs or so, but I can't remember if I have: I think this book is good enough. Not in its present form, obviously, since there's so much work yet to do. But I'm feeling more confident that this story will impress someone that they'll give me a shot. Perhaps that's egotism--probably is egotism, since I do seem to esteem my writing more than it warrants--but it's something that I really hope for.
Then I get a small measure of reality when I think about publishing this story: It's a character novel about a Poet. So I'm mixing poetry (not the world's most popular topic) and throwing it into a blender with politics, world building, and high fantasy locations. It doesn't really scream summer blockbuster. While I find it captivating and worthwhile, I'm unsure of how to pitch this thing so that people get excited about it. I mean, let's be honest: How many people are really thrilled to hear about the idea of poetry as a magic system in a fantasy world? How often do people stop and say, "I have a hankerin' for some Billy Collins and Robert Frost"? (Not that I'm as good as either of them--not by a long shot--they just happened to pop into mind.) It's pretty rare that poetry gets people going. Even though Poetry as a magic system is important, it isn't used to excess in the book, which is something that I can't decide if I should downplay or trump up.
But then I think of how interesting the book actually is. Obviously I'm biased, but I can look at my own writings and determine when the stories really have a lot going for them, and, in this case, I think that I do have something cooking that's worthwhile. I do. I just have to keep believing and hoping that someone feels the same way as I, and that we meet up somehow.
Of course, I could go and write a flashback...but I'm not certain that I want to do that right now, since the scene that's cooking in my head is in a different place entirely. It's hard to write in less ambiguous terms than what I've said here, so, rather than spinning my wheels, I'll just move on to something else that I wanted to discuss.
I'm taking a class on World War I right now from one of my favorite professors of history. The class is what gets me out of the house each Saturday, which is a good thing, since it gives me a secondary reason for coming down to UVU besides the urge to write. The thing is, the topics I learn about are extremely depressing (like, majorly depressing), and I get a little out of sorts. The scenes that I'm writing about are serious--I've yet to be able to write anything even approaching comedy in my stories--but they're of a different type of seriousness. So I'm having a hard time channeling that emotion that I get from studying history into my writing. One thing's for certain, however: I'm not writing Calistar correctly.
Calistar is a warrior. He grew up wanting to be in the Jajiini militia (their armed forces) and following in his older brother's footsteps by fighting for his god and his country. But along the way, something in him changed and eventually he became a pacifist--personally, not one that cared if others felt the same way. He just wanted to stop hurting others, despite the fact that he could do it so well.
My problem with Calistar is that he isn't a soldier who has all of the right characteristics. One of the things I've mentioned before is that Calistar's precursor was Victor from Tales from the Flame. Victor and Calistar share the ability to be fighters who want to give it up, though in Victor's case it's a little bit different, since he has magical powers that are driving him crazy and making him want to kill. At any rate, Cal made the active, conscious choice not to murder or hurt people any more, but his weakness that carried over from Victor was that he's always in a situation where violence is called for. While that serves my purposes in the story, it doesn't feel authentic.
Perhaps I need to indulge in a bit of imaginative suffering and go through the flashback of Calistar's first battle. I don't think that it affected him enough. I don't think he became the kind of disturbed individual that wars give us. My professor today pointed out that there are generational consequences for being exposed to war--domestic abuse from returned veterans on their families, the insanity of the men as they try to cope with being home again having seen what they have seen, and many more important, forgotten things. Cal doesn't operate that way. He's not struggling enough with the choice and the reality. He isn't feeling the pain of war as deeply as he should.
Then again, we're talking about modern war as opposed to medieval warfare. Perhaps there's a difference in how a soldier responds to seeing a shell turn his friend into a geyser of gore and dirt as opposed to how a soldier responds to the feeling of his own sword driving through armor and grating against the ribs of his enemy. I don't know. But I worry that an ethical, moral person who knows that killing is wrong will have to face the consequences of choosing against what is right, and, having never done it, I won't be able to really express the problems and difficulties that derive thereby. Or maybe I'm just worrying over nothing.
Different Topic
I'm having the most curious feeling about all this, though, that I'm going to go ahead and express, even though it sounds silly: I'm looking forward to doing revisions on this thing. I actually am...I can hardly wait to have the whole manuscript in my hands--even though I probably won't use the hard copy for my revisions--and knowing that I've put the ideas down. I'm not casting about for the next story and eager to see the end of this one. In fact, I think I might be trying to add complications to the story just so that I can keep going on it and not have it end. (I'm fighting the impulse.)
This leads me to another possibility, one that I may have mentioned in the last 20 logs or so, but I can't remember if I have: I think this book is good enough. Not in its present form, obviously, since there's so much work yet to do. But I'm feeling more confident that this story will impress someone that they'll give me a shot. Perhaps that's egotism--probably is egotism, since I do seem to esteem my writing more than it warrants--but it's something that I really hope for.
Then I get a small measure of reality when I think about publishing this story: It's a character novel about a Poet. So I'm mixing poetry (not the world's most popular topic) and throwing it into a blender with politics, world building, and high fantasy locations. It doesn't really scream summer blockbuster. While I find it captivating and worthwhile, I'm unsure of how to pitch this thing so that people get excited about it. I mean, let's be honest: How many people are really thrilled to hear about the idea of poetry as a magic system in a fantasy world? How often do people stop and say, "I have a hankerin' for some Billy Collins and Robert Frost"? (Not that I'm as good as either of them--not by a long shot--they just happened to pop into mind.) It's pretty rare that poetry gets people going. Even though Poetry as a magic system is important, it isn't used to excess in the book, which is something that I can't decide if I should downplay or trump up.
But then I think of how interesting the book actually is. Obviously I'm biased, but I can look at my own writings and determine when the stories really have a lot going for them, and, in this case, I think that I do have something cooking that's worthwhile. I do. I just have to keep believing and hoping that someone feels the same way as I, and that we meet up somehow.
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