Novel Watch #37: +5 pages [96.5 total]
Big changes afoot here. If you read my “Seven Steps for Writing a Novel” you’ll probably be able to guess that I spent most of the last week or so in Step 6, which is not a good place to be. Since my last update I’ve managed to add pages at an agonizingly slow rate. When I only add two paragraphs my excitement about posting an update dims a little.
However, I have come to a couple of realizations that I think will help me continue. First of all, I realized that everything needs to be a little more connected, and it just kind of popped into my head that Bandolor and Erskavit (now just the Tongue of Erskavit) should have a past together. Not dating or something really weird like that, but a history of conflict. So now they do, and that actually shines a lot of light on Bandolor’s character and why he’s so driven towards what others call heresy.
Secondly, it’s becoming really clear that trying to do crazy language stuff just isn’t working. I’ve been pulling back on that a lot, but I think the time has come to rearrange a few things in my head and keep the archaic syntax and the “thous” while tossing the plan to use older words and the like. Except for Fink. He gets to keep on being incomprehensible, because I find that endearing somehow.
Relationships. I’ve got to remember that every story is about relationships. Plot is great, and it provides a structure for characters to interact, but the real story is in the interaction, not the action.
Finally, I’m back to thinking of things in a smaller sense. The section I’m working on right now, while skipping ahead from where I was at before, is more or less self-contained. There’s an arc in these 3-4 scenes and if I can get it right, that’ll be great. Does it resolve anything? No, not really. But it kind of cycles back on itself, or something.
I based Erskavit’s writing style on that of Herodotus:
Like a caged beast, Adrianna paced back and forth in Bandolor’s study, her eyes prowling across the pages of Bandolor’s books. Already hampered by her difficulty understanding the letters on the page, Adrianna quickly grew frustrated by the ramblings of a madman. He was boot-eating crazy, and his mind wandered in every direction simultaneously, short digressions flowing into torrential tangents, and those tangents in turn eclipsed by further departure from his original point, until all his loopy thinking formed a Russian doll of tangents nestled within each other.
(Argh. I think I used the word “tangent” too many times in that paragraph.)