This post is an unabashed love letter to some of my best friends.
Yes, e-books are nice; they're cheaper and you can download them instantly, you can fit a whole library inside a Kindle, you can read when the lights are out, and you can watch videos and surf the internet on a Kindle. You can't do any of that with an actual book. But I like books better. Here's why:
Recently I ran across a problem in one of my stories. I'd been having lots of fun developing my character, playing around with setting, drawing a brilliant story arc... and then during a reread it hit me:
I was the only person who knew where the story was going. Anyone else reading it wouldn't have had a clue. In fact, all my readers would have been asking this:
That's a major problem. If I don't know where a story is going, I'm likely to lose interest. It's like the road in that picture at the top. (It's not a good picture; I'm an amateur photographer, okay?) The road drags your eye right out of the picture and there isn't anything to pull your focus back in. People want to see enough of a road so that they have a general idea of where it will take them if they step out onto it.
And it's the same way with stories. Readers need to be able to see where the story is headed. What I was missing in my story was a main goal for the hero--something that he was working towards. Readers need to know what the main character is trying to do, even if they don't know whether or not he will succeed. Camp Nano is now officially over so I thought I'd do a quick recap of the month. I spent 30 hours revising this month, paring down a 50,000 word novel to around 33,000 words and then building it up again to around 36,000. I'm about five-sevenths of the way through the first draught (page 51 out of 69) and hope to have a complete second draught before May is over. |
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AuthorA. M. Potter Some other great blogs...
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November 2017
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