Thursday, June 28, 2007

A Priest Walks Into the Room

And what do you do with him. No kidding, this happens to me a lot in this novel. Do you trust this sort of occurence in your writing? Does it usually work out? So far he's a hectoring sort of guy and he might be dragging the book down in his need to discuss priests with AIDs. What do you think? Does my subconscious know best? Or when your conscious mind has to deal with the fancies of your subconscious, does it make mistakes?



Watched Thunderfoot and Lightfoot last night and I didn't quite get it. It was so meandering and it seemed like CE had phoned his part in. Jeff was good and I liked the George Kennedy performance but it was awfully lethargic. Again, perhaps the post 9/11 world has spoiled movies like this for me. I wonder if I had seen in ten years ago if I would have thought differently.

6 comments:

Sandra Ruttan said...

I don't know the answer Patti. I don't think I have quite enough to say for certain. If you think he might be dragging the book down...

I find myself asking a few things. One is who reasonably would be at a certain scene. Sometimes a subconscious pull is nudging me about something I overlooked and you just know. But if I have any doubts someone should be in a scene I consider it and then, unless a very clear reason clicks and makes sense to me, I don't have them there.

Not that I'm much on formula, but I remember all the harping about goal/motivation/conflict. If in doubt I ask, what's the purpose of this scene? What's the point? Then I ask if the character is necessary to achieve that.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Thanks, Sandra. I have never been at a story so long and strange things are happening. The pries raises the stakes for her, so for now I'll leave him alone but ask him to stop the lecturing.

Megan said...

Eh. Let him lecture, get it out of his system. It's a draft. Assert your authorial rights later and slice out swathes that don't work.

Yeah, I watched that movie as background to websurfing a few months ago, and was underwhelmed. A good background movie will slow my rate of surfing. In this case, I found myself looking up every fifteen or twenty minutes, wondering vaguely what I'd missed, and then deciding probably not much.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Glad it's not just me.

On reflection, my husband decided he liked it. He does that--decides he liked it later. I think he just likes bugging me.

Sandra Scoppettone said...

I don't know if this is a story or your novel but I think this applies to both: don't worry about it now. You seem to want to cut off your creativity with questions instead of letting it simply happen.

Questions come later. They're called rewriting.

pattinase (abbott) said...

I guess it's because I'm not used to feeling out of control. ANd I'm not used to the story not being pretty well reined in at the end of the day. The way I do short stories is to edit what I did yesterday and all the yesterdays before that before moving forward. Can't do that now so I have these questionable scenes.