The Sprawling Novel
September 11, 2001
7:31 a.m.
I hate to make an off-the-page reference like this, but I received a particularly spectacular rejection from Gordon Van Gelder yesterday. I'm not going to go into details, but let's just say that he has a particularly sublime sense of humor. Still, the beat goes on. I see Lisa Silverthorne is crossing a major milestone in her book--60,000 words and all that. Go, Lisa, go....   I'm enjoying this extra pass at Glamour of the God-Touched. It's nice to have written something at this length that seems to stand up, you know? Yes, I'm making little changes and tweaks, but the story was all pretty much there. I'm finding a lot of Maass's breakout book to be useful here. Having his checklists fresh in my mind as I'm scanning has been useful as a testing/diagnostic tool. Tension and conflict? Check. Characters bigger than life? Check. Etc, etc. I don't mean to make the process sound so mechanical, of course. Assessing and diagnosing a story is not like fitting all the square pegs into square holes and the round pegs into round holes. Assessing a story is a sloppy process, and doing it on something as large and sprawling as a novel is a lot like finger painting a mural on the Empire State Building. You work like mad on a little 10x10 section, then have to step way back to see how what you've done works in context with the rest of the piece. But I'll take every tool I can get, and the Maass book is the one freshest on my mind at this point, so that's what comes to the forefront here. Anyway. There I am. Pontificating on process again. Who knows, maybe tomorrow I'll have a real entry, eh?
Have a great day.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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