Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 4
Total Queries: 41
Rejections: 24
Scenes Mapped: 55
Total Scenes: 416
I hit my stride while I was on a work trip last week. On the flight there and back I knocked out the mapping for the entire seventh eighth. That brings us to the climactic portion of the book. What has surprised me is how the climax has shifted from what I had originally envisioned. I think it’s going to be good. I’ve got to get back into querying, though. I gotta sell the first book!
Filling the Well
Panacea: 170/383
Bloodwitch: 55%
The Archived: 62%
The Bible: 63%
The Dream Thieves: 100% (Book 23 of 25 for #ProjectBookworm2019)
Skinner Box: 100% (Book 24 of 25 for #ProjectBookworm2019)
The New Prometheus: 100% (Book 25 of 25 for #ProjectBookworm2019)
LOTS of reading going on here. I finished the initial goal for Project Bookworm for this year which feels good. I want to dig deep and check some stuff off my TBR since that is still growing faster than I can read so lets see what I can pull off by year’s end.
Polishing the Well
I just got back from a week in Phoenix, Arizona. In July. Let me tell you, I’ve lived in Florida my whole life and it’s hot here. I’ve always heard that Arizona, specifically, is different because it’s hot too BUT IT’S A DRY HEAT.
Now I know what that means.
It got up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit while I was there and yet I wasn’t sweating. Instead, I was drying out. My wife described it best: Florida is a sauna and Arizona is an oven. My eyes were dried out every day by 2pm. It was wild.
I’ll take my sauna, thank you very much.
Well Chat
Give Your Characters Time to Breathe…and React
So let’s talk about downtime in stories. Everyone likes action. Okay, maybe not everyone, but that statement is nearly ubiquitous. We like stuff to happen in our stories. Heck, we like stuff to happen in our lives. But we all get tired right? Guess what! So too do your characters. So they need a minute to breathe, to relax, to react. Otherwise, it starts to strain credibility.
What do I mean by this? Well, in reality, we all wear out after a day of work or less. We all go to sleep at night. In America, most of us plop down in front of the TV in the evening to relax before bed. We need time to recharge before we jump into the next day. We all want to do more, to get more done, but we all wear out and we all KNOW that we’re going to wear out. It’s an aspect of human nature.
Story characters are supposed to be the best and worst of us, to surpass the human condition and accomplish goals that we could only aspire to. But the aspiration has to be there. Your heroes can’t be superhuman as to never tire, even if they ARE superhuman. Superman wears out. Batman DEFINITELY wears out. Captain America can do this all day, but at night he takes a rest too. We know that eventually all our heroes will wear out. That’s fine. But if they don’t, it starts to strain credibility and threaten the suspension of disbelief. If the reader loses that, they’ll pick your story apart.
If we can agree that characters need downtime in story, especially to have time to react to all the things happening to them and the choices they’re making, then how do you build that in. One of my favorite tools for this is travel. When characters are stuck on some kind of transport like a boat or riding cross-country on a horse then they have nothing to do except think, react, and plan for what comes next. There is also the tactic of having the group stop in town for the night. This is a more literal rest, but you can predicate it on one character in the group needing it. If this frustrates your protagonist, all the better to inform their other reactions. And there are lots of other tools from imprisonment to waiting to even funerals. All of this gives your character time to react.
Reactions are important, as I’ve said before, because that is how your characters come to decisions which become the goals of their next actions. When in your life you’ve come to a decision about something, I would go so far as to guarantee that if you really thought about it the source of that decision grew out of a reaction to something you did or something that happened to you. Art imitates life and so the same has to be true of your characters.
So give your story time to breathe and to react. This aspect of reality will keep your reader in the story rather than deter them for lack of action.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG