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I seem to be full of epiphanies lately
Mar. 30th, 2009 06:00 amI woke up early this morning and while I was laying here bemoaning my inability to go back to sleep, my mind meandered around the problems in my WIP.
It'd been suggested by a crit group that I merge two of my characters together. I was lying here this morning trying to justify keeping both, expecting to extend this justification to the group, so I was thinking about it pretty heavily. In trying to justify both boy's existence, I was got the idea to reduce them to symbols. And BAM! the problems in the story slid into view and then I saw the way.
I don't usually like to reduce stories to symbolism and meaning. And I finally realized why. Because it takes away the sense of wonder that stories give me. Taking them apart and reducing them to deeper issues and finding their meaning takes away their innocence from me. I read to enjoy. To be transported to another world where moonbeams are white steeds and fairies are real, and even an ordinary person can turn that frog into a prince. Trying to look for what the frog symbolizes takes away all his magic. This is why I make a horrible reviewer and why I have no aspirations to be one. I don't want to digest stories, I want to hold them together in one bright magic handful and then tuck them away, bringing their light out to enjoy again on dark evenings.
But in writing a story, maybe I do need to strip away and examine each bit and piece. In my WIP, I saw that one of the characters symbolized innocence, and the other, lost hope. That's why I need them both. And now that I have this concrete in my head, I think I can write the story and keep it on track. Because, like all my stories, it was trying to bring too much into it. Now that I'm focused, I think it will be too. In the course of this, I do have to kill off one of my darlings. Another character I was trying to bring in is just trying to confuse the issue. I already have the two mystic-like characters, and a third was getting a little too much to juggle. I'm very much in love with this character and especially how he appears to my struggling little band of pathetics, but that's another story. And that's exciting, because I was just thinking the other day that my muse well had dried up and I hadn't a new story hovering around waiting to be heard. Well, this one won't be brand new, but in a way it might. I like writing stories in the same world. And it'll even be more or less the same characters, just alternate ending type of thing. Or, maybe this will want to be a novel after all. Too soon to tell, and it might be too dark for a YA novel.
It'd been suggested by a crit group that I merge two of my characters together. I was lying here this morning trying to justify keeping both, expecting to extend this justification to the group, so I was thinking about it pretty heavily. In trying to justify both boy's existence, I was got the idea to reduce them to symbols. And BAM! the problems in the story slid into view and then I saw the way.
I don't usually like to reduce stories to symbolism and meaning. And I finally realized why. Because it takes away the sense of wonder that stories give me. Taking them apart and reducing them to deeper issues and finding their meaning takes away their innocence from me. I read to enjoy. To be transported to another world where moonbeams are white steeds and fairies are real, and even an ordinary person can turn that frog into a prince. Trying to look for what the frog symbolizes takes away all his magic. This is why I make a horrible reviewer and why I have no aspirations to be one. I don't want to digest stories, I want to hold them together in one bright magic handful and then tuck them away, bringing their light out to enjoy again on dark evenings.
But in writing a story, maybe I do need to strip away and examine each bit and piece. In my WIP, I saw that one of the characters symbolized innocence, and the other, lost hope. That's why I need them both. And now that I have this concrete in my head, I think I can write the story and keep it on track. Because, like all my stories, it was trying to bring too much into it. Now that I'm focused, I think it will be too. In the course of this, I do have to kill off one of my darlings. Another character I was trying to bring in is just trying to confuse the issue. I already have the two mystic-like characters, and a third was getting a little too much to juggle. I'm very much in love with this character and especially how he appears to my struggling little band of pathetics, but that's another story. And that's exciting, because I was just thinking the other day that my muse well had dried up and I hadn't a new story hovering around waiting to be heard. Well, this one won't be brand new, but in a way it might. I like writing stories in the same world. And it'll even be more or less the same characters, just alternate ending type of thing. Or, maybe this will want to be a novel after all. Too soon to tell, and it might be too dark for a YA novel.
