The A to Z Book Diary: "C" is for Conflict Carving

Recently, I reached Chapter 8 and page 95 of my burgeoning novel, and I realized a few things with a smidgen of concern: the first is that my chapters are really kind of unreasonably long, the second is that I've turned the word "and" into my story's nervous tic (note to self to sort that out later), and the third is that while Chapter 8 signals the final gradual rise to the overall climax of the conflict, my previous chapters suddenly seem as though they might have been dragging their feet from scuffle to scuffle to sporadic bouts of dialogue, with not enough tension-building tying them all together towards the final Big Bang.

To say the least, this last one especially could be a problem. Can't very well write a great climax if the foundation leading up to it is shoddy - no one would read past the shoddy-bit to get to that exciting part I've been looking forward to since the start! ...A big problem indeed.

On a basic level, this thing I'm working on now is an action/adventure/survival drama. With a really long walk being the foundation for a good chunk of the culminating events. While mulling over how to go about relating this long-distance trek my characters have to take, I've found myself more and more worried about how I was going to make sure this trip's been interesting and purposeful throughout, rather than something along the lines of "Aaaand we're walking.... walking... walking... and HOLY CRUD, SOMETHING HAPPENS!!... And we're back to walking again... are we there yet?". 

Image courtesy of lobster20/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If that's the way I do it, it's going to end up reading like a really lengthily-described episode of Survivorman. Just with a bigger cast of people lacing up their survivor footwear and putting their battling-the-elements caps on.

So how to combat this potential tension-killing flaw? Well, the best I can figure so far is making my narrator (first person, present-tense) as engaging as possible, so that if nothing else, each episode of action gets the context of not just a gradually unfolding threat, but of the narrator's experience of it to relate everything together, and to relate it to the climax at the end. Try to make this character the story's getting filtered through as perceptive as possible without being unrealistically intuitive, and have them caught up in scuffles as the journey progresses, but not so much that there isn't breathing room between skirmishes, and actual reasons for the skirmishes so those don't feel like random unnecessary page-wasters.

But even then, how much action is too much action? How much first-person narrative is too much narrative? Where is the roughly ideal balance between action and narrative while building towards the final hurrah and conflict resolution?

Maybe the answers to these questions will get clearer once I've finished the overall story, and read through the whole thing start to finish, rather than bit by bit, as each chunk gets written and roughly edited before moving on to the next. One of those things where a look at the overall picture will settle how the smaller details need to play out...

Ahhh, the ever-looming official Editing - you're going to be a hell of a time aren't you!

~\\//~

Word count as of today: 55,307

IT LIVES!!... Part 2 (or The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Writer of A-Street)

...Just who is this strange creature, this Swamp Thing that has emerged from the primordial goop of an infernally long blogging hiatus? Could it be...? 

It is -- Look at that: it's the dork who promised "more regular postings" as of the middle of last summer... and then proceeded to vanish in the wake of the nonsense of other obligations/obstacles/assorted-whatnot-of-ridiculousness.

Well, hi there!

What can I say? If you're reading this, then I hope you can forgive this ridiculous person for apparently jumping ship for almost 8 months. 

...Of course, if you've never read any of my stuff before now, you probably truly don't care how long this random writer/blogger person has apparently been away. In which case, I'll just say to you, "Welcome to my humble abode! Stick around a while, and put your feet up - I've spent months stewing in an overload of brain muck, and am back the more determined for it, with plenty of new material and a regular posting schedule to come. Pinky swear."

At any rate, I am happy to report several bright points of news, aside from gearing up to get back to both my "Writing Tips" and "A to Z Book Diary" threads, among other upcoming projects.

First: one month to go on my university degree - HUZZAH!!! I mean... ahem. I'm looking forward to being finished. Just a little.

Second: after I finish my degree, I'm moving back to my hometown and using all I've learned from school and my unpaid work as head of a literary journal in my current city to start up a literary journal with my big sister - so stay tuned for updates as we get things underway and open shop for submissions!

And third: I've recently passed the 55,000 word mark for my novel! One plus side, it seems, for having spent 8 months losing my mind a bit - immense stress and periodic insomnia made me more productive than I've ever been as a cheap way to cheer myself up in my free time :)

So, all my news aside, I want to pass along a mountain of gratitude for the folks that have sent along bits of encouragement along the way these past months, and to the people that have shown interest in this blog in the past, and interest in seeing it continue in the future. I'll be back to lurking around a few of the writers groups around here as well, so I look forward to reconnecting, and I'll leave you with a blurb I came across recently that left me grinning:

"I'm a writer. If I'm staring at you, I'm not being rude. I'm trying to decide if you need to go in a book. If you're a snot, I may be trying to decide how to kill you."

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