Monday, May 11, 2020

Not much for weaving...

This week's subject asks a rather significant question: Do you Weave?

In this case, weaving means to go back to a story and add in scenes to change the tale. Now, sometimes that men's in a situation where you're repairing a tale. In other cases the real question is Do You work in a linear or non-linear fashion.

I'm linear. I HAVE had to weave in repairs, but I don't like to do it.  know the beginning, the middle, and the end of a story before I start. it might change as I go along, but it's incredibly rare for me to add in a scene after the fact.

It's a matter of structure and a matter of how my mind works I've had a few occasions where something wasn't work was writing it, but in most cases that meant deleting part of the book stopping what I was doing ad rewriting a block of the tale before I ever got close to finishing it.

The one serious exception was SERENITY FALLS, which is easily the largest piece I ever wrote. The first version of the book was 300,000 words long and came out as a single volume When the paperback version came out it was decided by the publisher to make it a trilogy. In order to make that happen, I added 40,000 words of story and shuffled quite a bit of the book around to guarantee easy story flow.

No, that's not a typo. I added half a novel worth of work in the weave. It was necessary in order to make the story as seamless as possible and meant adding well over a dozen new scenes. I do not regret any part of that work, just for the record.

Still, I'd rather not is my point.









1 comment:

  1. Ugh, weaving in repairs is my least favorite part. Ugh. I can't imagine weaving in an extra 40,000 words!!!

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