Which reminds me...
Of a couple things I'd been meaning to talk about.
Sorry for the late post. I wrote this really long thing about Stick, my next novel, and then I decided I couldn't post it.
A few weeks ago, I pasted in excerpts from stuff I'd written in the past year or so. Well, actually, I wrote Stick right at the very end of 2009, as a sort of see-if-I-could-do-NaNo thing. Which I did. And the product of that month of writing is going to be on the shelves this fall.
(and ARCs, which I am dying/dreading to see, will be out in a few weeks)
I think it was Matthew Rush who asked me about poetry. Like a lot of things (go figure...), I have strong opinions about poetry.
And Stick is written in a very weird way that some people are going to think is verse.
But it's not.
So don't go there.
Now, on the other hand, most of the chapters from In the Path of Falling Objects begin with verse, but nobody ever said anything about that to me. So, go figure.
Someone asked me about word count targets when I write. I don't really have them. Naturally, at the end of every day (and, believe me, I know when a writing day is ended) I do look at what I've done in relation to where the day began.
I'm never satisfied, though.
It took me about 5 weeks to write Stick. It's my shortest novel, too, at about 74,000 words. So, you can do the math as far as daily writing counts go.
And the book I am writing at the moment (which I will be finished with by April 22... among other reasons because I have a short-story deadline for an anthology I'm going to be in next year... and, besides that, I always know when I'll be finished with writing a novel), there are two sentences in particular, each of which I have rewritten more than 100 times now.
The first is 24 words, and the second is 34. They have nothing to do with one another and they occur at different points in the story arc. I'm definitely not going to post them, but I feel like they're perfect at this point and I can move on.
If pictures can contain 1000 words, then every novel has to have a few perfect sentences containing stories that vastly exceed the limits of a final punctuation mark.
Not every sentence.
That would be like death by chocolate.
But there needs to be some indeterminate number of them that you just want to read and taste over and over.
At least, that's what I believe.
8 comments:
I'm amazed you have any life outside of writing. It's truely amazing the time you spend writing but as one of your fans, thank you. And even though I've read all your published work, and read Marbury more than once, I'm a bit partial to your first child Ghost Medicine.
Does one sentence really make such a difference? I mean if it travels like shakespeare's "to be or not to be", then I guess that's true.
It's good that you take so much care with wording, but I think the coherence and connections of the sentences on the whole is what counts. I think.
Nahno ∗ McLein ™
Oh, this is the stuff of a great discussion, Nahno.
Yes... there are certain sentences in every novel I've written that act as types of cardinal points for me, I think... and I've found myself, for whatever reasons, constantly drawn to them because of their rhythm, the appearance of the actual letters on the page, the multiple connotations within their context, and the variety of interpretations which can justifiably derive from them.
Maybe that's my own neurosis/psychosis at play.
But this is definitely something worth talking about, I think.
I'm considering making a personal goal to find something you have no opinion about.
Poetry...poetry...ick.
Hmm. I'm not so sure that something can't be verse-esque, verse, and not verse at the same time. I mean what is verse, anyway? Have you read Kerouac's 'On Western Haiku?'
It's incredible, and is, I suppose, technically poetry, but I'm not so sure it's verse.
This is a great thread. I've thought about this as a writer and as a reader. I think one sentence can make a difference - and for me it's expecially true for the opening sentence of a novel. I agonize over that as a writer because for me it has to both hook the reader and set the tone and direction for the whole book. I think the opening lline has to be perfect. I wish I could tell when other lines in my work were equally as important but I have a difficult time seeing the forest for trees until way later in the editing process. I think recognizing the importance of individual lines at key points in a work means that the writer has a great sense of story arc and structure - something I struggle with.
Sometimes I think of a book as a fireworks display with pauses, small bursts, and sensational explosions or displays of color without sound - appearing at intervals throughout the tale. As a reader I like a balance with some sentences that make me stop, pause, and just wonder at what's happening before I move on. I don't necessarily remember the sentences later but I do remember their effect and the point in the story that they appeared.
Oh... I totally agree about the first sentence in a book, and the whole fireworks display idea.
There are always going to be those few scattered sentences here and there, that, for me, entirely make the book what it is.
I participated in NaNo for the first time in November 2010. The mystery novel I wrote is still hiding in my filing cabinet. I'm getting the itch to yank it from the darkness and begin revisions. I've been busy with a creative writing class I believe will make a massive improvement on what I wrote.
Speaking of sentences...as an voracious reader, I run across sentences that strike me. They're written down in my journals, and they still have meaning to me years later. Somehow everything just falls into place and makes magic.
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