Drawing from the Well
Scenes Arranged: 0
Total Scenes: 154
Another zero day. Too much work and not enough dedicated time to my book. Things are out of balance. Must fix it. That’s all I’ve got to say there.
Filling the Well
That Hideous Strength: 34%
Sightwitch: 48%
Jessica Jones: S2E10 of 13
Got some mental consumption in yesterday so that was nice. THS is FINALLY connecting back to Perelandra, even if only tangentially for now. I see why the foreword of the book stated that this could be read as a standalone or as the third book in the series. The connection, now found at TWENTY-SEVEN PERCENT into the book, is through the main character of the first two books, but they changed his name for now! So if you had no context from Malakandra (Out of the Silent Planet) or Perelandra, you’d have no idea who this was except some shadowy figure in the background. I don’t like it at all. It’s actually the subject of today’s Well Chat below.
Polishing the Well
Our older cat, Lilly, is having surgery on this bad boy today. She is polydactyl with a total of 27 toes. The problem is that two of those MANY toes are totally vestigial. We trimmed the nail for a while, but now it’s growing into her paw. It doesn’t appear to be causing her any pain, but leaving it to a later date can only cause more problems. So she’s going under the knife today. Hopefully she’ll be back to her normal life in a few days.
Well Chat
Goldilocks Writing
Let’s talk about what I consider the “Goldilocks zone” of writing. Usually this phrase is used in connection with the habitable area around a star, but here we’re talking about how a novel is paced. When I call it the Goldilocks zone, I’m talking about the place where the pacing isn’t too fast or too slow, but it’s juuuuuuuuuust right.
This is where That Hideous Strength comes in. As the third book in a series, it would make sense that the connection between books 2 and 3 would be made pretty quickly if not right away. That is not the case here. That Hideous Strength can ALSO be read as a standalone novel. This makes no sense to me and having come right off Perelandra, I was excited to see where the story would go.
I was immediately disappointed and confused. I struggled to even focus on the story before me because I couldn’t get past the ever-echoing question of “Why does it have to be this way?”
This is an example of pacing that is too slow to me. There’s a bunch of piddling about that doesn’t APPEAR to be going anywhere. I’m listening to this as an audiobook so it took over three hours to FINALLY see where this was going. That is just too long.
So the answer is to have stuff happening all the time right? Well, not exactly. In real life, we have way more “downtime” than we have times where things happen. This gives us time to think, reflect, and, ultimately, grow. Have you ever had periods of your life where you felt like you were going all the time without stopping? Do you remember how frayed and frustrated you were? Yeah, your reader will feel the same way if you treat your characters like they don’t need downtime.
Characters, just like people, need time to react to situations (I’ll cover this in tomorrow’s blog). Without that, they can’t evaluate where they are and what they want to decide what to do and where to go next. They need time to breathe. If stuff is always happening to them, they can’t pivot and take action. In books like this (of which I currently have no examples), the pacing is too fast.
Thus, you need to land in the Goldilocks zone? How? Well, that’s up to intuition, learning, and editing. I could always sense when something was off with my first book. I took time to read books about story structure, scene structure, and writing itself to learn about the issues and pitfalls with pacing (among other things). Then I brought in a professional editor who pointed out the pacing problems I missed. It takes a lot of work to iron these things out, but if you don’t, your work will suffer.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG