Styles and stances
Just what I feared has come to pass and that too without me even noticing it :p The gaps between my blog entries are growing longer again. Of course, I’ve been rather busy the last few days. I’m now in the process of doing two crits of two different novels, editing "Honest" as and when necessary (though not doing the major re-write that I’m beginning to think is inevitable) and also working on my new novel, "The Hunt for ‘Read October’". Weird name? Yeah, it is but it’s an even weirder story :p
In fact, "Hunt" is actually proceeding along fairly well. I get about 2-3 pages a day done and since the biggest challenge in writing is to apply yourself consistently, I’ve been very careful to be sure that I meet my daily quota. When I wrote "Honest", I stuck to a kind of artificial limitation – I wanted to ensure that a scene was at least 8 pages long – at this point, I’m not really sure why :p I think it had something to do with Gordon R. Dickson and "The Final Encyclopedia" where, if I’m not mistaken, he stuck to 8 or 10 pages per chapter consistently, chapter after chapter. And it was a huge book too!
Of course, trying to ensure that a scene is a particular length imposes more strain on you when trying to write because then you have to constantly watch yourself or start thinking about how to make a scene longer if it turns out to be too short. With "Hunt" I simply went with the flow. The scenes are actually much shorter and I write them as they come and move on. I’ve found that things flow much more smoothly this way. I might even have chapter breaks on this one after I’m done, I’m not sure yet. Of course, there are like ten scenes to a chapter and the chapters will be about 20-30 pages long and so I’m not sure if chapters are the best way to go but at least, this book is beginning to have better structure than the last one 🙂