![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Slogging Through
Sep. 4th, 2010 11:23 amIn undergrad I took a course on Tolkien where we spent half the semester on The Lord of the Rings. Once the Fellowship breaks, Frodo, Sam, and Gollum spend the rest of the The Two Towers toiling through unforgiving landscapes. They get lost and wander through the rocky labyrinth of Emyn Muil, then slog through the interminable Dead Marshes on the Plain of Dagorlad.
I've always identified with how these events happen in the middle of the book (I'm referring to the entire cycle here, since it was intended to be a single volume), because the middle is always the hardest part of writing a book. In the beginning you are excited, motivated, charged with this new idea that still has all of its sparkle and shine. You start building a world and putting characters into it and seeing how they interact and then at some point you realize you are lost. Isn't that the same outcropping of rocks from twenty pages ago?
That's kind of how I feel about my WiP right now. I've set myself a NaNo-like goal of writing 1500 words a day every day in September so that I can finish the novel by the end of the month. That will give me most of October to work on revisions and putting together the other items one needs in order to successfully query agents/editors.
One of the things that has helped me with this novel was writing out a very detailed synopsis during the early writing process. There have been deviations from the synopsis, but nothing major. So every time I get lost or am unsure about what I'm writing, I go back to the synopsis to get my bearings. I'm going to start doing this for all of my books. It also helps a great deal in keeping character names and details straight.
Now it's back to slogging. Well, after I finish my homework for my MFA class.
I've always identified with how these events happen in the middle of the book (I'm referring to the entire cycle here, since it was intended to be a single volume), because the middle is always the hardest part of writing a book. In the beginning you are excited, motivated, charged with this new idea that still has all of its sparkle and shine. You start building a world and putting characters into it and seeing how they interact and then at some point you realize you are lost. Isn't that the same outcropping of rocks from twenty pages ago?
That's kind of how I feel about my WiP right now. I've set myself a NaNo-like goal of writing 1500 words a day every day in September so that I can finish the novel by the end of the month. That will give me most of October to work on revisions and putting together the other items one needs in order to successfully query agents/editors.
One of the things that has helped me with this novel was writing out a very detailed synopsis during the early writing process. There have been deviations from the synopsis, but nothing major. So every time I get lost or am unsure about what I'm writing, I go back to the synopsis to get my bearings. I'm going to start doing this for all of my books. It also helps a great deal in keeping character names and details straight.
Now it's back to slogging. Well, after I finish my homework for my MFA class.
