Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Done With HTRYN Week 3

I'm about a week behind (on the How to Revise Your Novel-HTRYN course) but I breezed through the rest of Week 3 over the weekend and am ready to start Week 4.  From the instructions, it sounds like it's going to be FUN.  It deals with plots and subplots and how to differentiate them in order to make you story interesting, readable and frustrating for your readers, by eliminating pointless asides that have no bearing on the main storyline and how it is unfolding.

But my problem is that I am just not sure what my main plot is.  I also really do have two main protagonists and a storyline that I have not managed to really flesh out to its full potential.   But then again, this is the reason why I am pursuing this course, now isn't it?

So, as far as I can make out, the Plot is supposed to be the main storyline without which none of the rest of the story's elements can stand.  This is my working definition as I get going on Week 4 of HTRYN, and I do hope that I am understanding it right.

As for Week 3, I had to go over my entire manuscript and find and describe every single scene.  I also had a slight problem defining what a scene is, but settled on the theatre definition of something that happens in a specific setting, between one or more people.  That's how I write them too, so they're pretty well demarcated and I rarely have more than one important element in a single scene.   Though I perhaps do not have elements to drive the story forward in every one of them.  I also tend to go over the same things in several scenes with different people, which is an annoying habit that I think I have carried over from my academic writings (you know, the ones where you have to hit a certain word count). I am an expert at saying the same thing in at least five different ways, but it does get boring after awhile.

Anyway, this part of HTRYN is still all about the big picture, so for the time being I'm not going to worry about all the stuff that I know I will have to fix, but have no idea how to fix.

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