How two write gud?

Depends on the book, I think. In the Novelist's Essential Guide series, and I can't remember if it was Raymond Obstfeld (on Crafting Scenes) or J. Madison Davis (on Creating Plot) but one of them had this chart of how rising action should, well, rise! But, there were dips in the line graph to demonstrate the tension release. I compared some of my own stories and realized that mine oscillated up and down over a generally flat plane, so it wasn't less tension-release for more tension than the last tension spike. But I liked it less when I rewrote it to fit the chart, and I like to read stuff by other people that doesn't fit that model.

edited 6th Jan '15 6:01:07 AM by Faemonic

.*necroes own thread* (had huge issues logging in with the update so couldn't post)

I'm still finding it tricky to actually write what happens between the major events. I find that the characters kind of just teleport between cool cities that I have fun describing, or I just jump straight to Cool Action Scene™ or other dramatic and important events. I can't even think of how to plan what they do in between.

It doesn't help that geographically the the plot covers a lot. It's mostly fantasy counterpart cultures, and the plot takes them from Fantasy!Venice to Fantasy!Brittany, then to Fantasy!Istanbul on the way to Fantasy!China. I know it's reasonable and expected to just skip boring travel, but is it acceptable to skip about a year's worth of travel? There's not a lot I can do with endless steppes.

edited 24th Jan '15 10:04:38 AM by VincentQuill

I think as long as we don't have any particular reason to expect anything to happen in that year, it should be fine. So nothing like an immediately dangling plot thread within the group. It's something like the Tethercat Principle- if nothing much is happening as the main cast leaves our field of vision, we can assume that nothing much continued to happen until they came back into view.

Maybe, but I do tend to skip a lot of the travel. Like chapter one is in fantasy!Venice, chapter two is in fantasy!Brittany, and so forth. Nothing of note happens between them so I don't write it, but I feel as if it seems like they're just hopping between cities, and skipping across an entire continent's worth of travel would just make this worse.

I suppose I'll reread some Tolkien and figure out how he managed to write so much travelling.

I'd just gloss over it with a short paragraph or sentence along the lines of "the journey from A to B was uneventful but long and tiring so the travellers were relieved when they finally arrived at the city gates" then follow up with one of the characters stating his/her intent to find a bath-house/tavern/brothel/decent hotel/whatever and relax because it's been 30 nights of nothing but shitty village inns/low-price motels/whatever or otherwise show the characters enjoying the excitement of the Cool City after the lengthy tedium of travel.

As long as you establish that there's no especial reason why travel would be perilous and leave no major dangling character conflicts or unresolved issues, there's no need to devote a lot of ink to it.

There's a lot of travel in the one I'm writing at the moment and even I'm "jumping" between events on the trail.

"After about another hour's walking James called a rest break..."

"We carried on downstream and about mid-afternoon, as we rounded a blind bend in the river, we were surprised to see..."

And that's for days in which quite a lot of stuff is happening. If they were taking an overnight train across country and they got there safely, I'd gloss over, in a sentence or two, everything between them embarking at one end and disembarking at the other.

I definitely can get away with doing that for shorter journeys (we'll say a few days to a month), but do the same rules apply to a year-long journey? Or would that just seem too much?

That depends on how often those kind of breaks happen. If it is just a one time deal, you could just split the story in two parts.

E.g. Part I: 2015

Chapter 1: January

Chapter 2: June

Chapter 3: October

Chapter 4: August (because reasons)

Part II: 2017

Chapter 1: Here we go again.

If you do this, you may only need to make a quick mention at the beginning of the second part to indicate that so much time has passed.

As for what actually happened during that year, you needn't go into too much detail about it. Maybe a few references that it was a very uneventful year, or the "time seems to go faster when you grow older... I can't believe it's been a year since we [insert random event here]".

My personal favourite is to express through my characters' dialogue what they've been up in a way that is (or may be) familiar to the readers. For example, having Alice asking questions about Bob's personal life and Bob replying that nothing's changed: he's still working the same job, doing the same things he did, etc.

edited 24th Jan '15 5:19:32 PM by Lorsty

>> I definitely can get away with doing that for shorter journeys (we'll say a few days to a month), but do the same rules apply to a year-long journey? Or would that just seem too much?

The rule is, if it's not important to the story itself, shows nothing the reader needs to know to understand the story, and does not serve as a trigger for Character Development, it can be skipped for as long as the story is not a slice-of-life running narrative taken from someone's diary (and it's not, because had it been you wouldn't be in this situation to begin with).

You could have a year-long journey that was so eventful you'd wonder if the characters had insulted a deity of random encounters in the past, and for as long as nothing plot-significant had happened during the journey you could still sum it all up with one phrase ("The journey had been long and quite eventful, but none of those events were anything more than just a distraction from their goal", or something like that), and maybe have the characters talk about it later or show it in flashbacks ... or just leave it as Noodle Incidents and have the characters make references to that, if the story is comedic at its core.

An important skill for a writer is the ability to recognise where more text enhances the story and where it is nothing more than headache-inducing Purple Prose. Many aspiring writers—including people who write fan-fiction—end up writing stories which would have been far better had it not been for the Purple Prose therein, because they do not yet have the ability to see that they are writing about details that are of no importance to the story and that nobody gives half a spork about.

Or, to put it into an example of a different sort, in "The Hobbit" the journey is a prominent part of the story not because things happen, but because the things that happen have a direct result (Bilbo's character development, him gaining the trust of the dwarves, him finding the ring) on the latter part of the story, results that cannot be skipped because skipping something that had resulted in character development and change of inter-personal relationships would only confuse readers. That's an example of a situation where you want to leave the journey in, because the journey was an important part of building a character or characters, and for that reason only.

edited 24th Jan '15 6:41:30 PM by Kazeto

Interesting, I hadn't thought of splitting it for some reason. Thanks!

Also very helpful! The journey itself isn't very relevant to the plot/characters so I suppose I'll skip it.